Dark Blonde: A Mike Angel Mystery

In another complex mystery, Julia Gateswood hires reluctant PI, Mike Angel, to find her missing sister, but Julia’s social position and her sister’s sordid past make this anything but a simple case. Julia’s a power-hungry ex-beauty queen, married for ambition to congressman Henry Gateswood, a charismatic ex-professor running for a vacated US Senate seat from Illinois in 1962. When Julia’s sister, a loose woman with past mob connections disappears, Julia calls on private eye Mike Angel, who quickly learns his new employer isn’t everything she seems to be, but what she is beyond a doubt is a great hypnotist of Mike’s libido. Can Mike live up to his father’s dictum, never to bed a client?

Before Mike is hardly into the case, he’s visited by Julia’s strange secretary, who later finds the missing sister’s headless body in the guesthouse of the Gateswood estate. Mike and his unofficial partner, Rick Anthony, a 25 year veteran of the NYC detective force and, whose vocabulary suffers from too many NYU grad classes, get to the crime scene before the police and follow clues that pit them against powerful Chicago mobsters.

One twisting aspect of Mike’s investigative instincts is often timely warnings from the “voice” of his late father, and also through sensations felt in a long scar Mike won during a shootout with the Russian mob who was behind his father’s death (in Dark Quarry). He also struggles with a desire to commit to Molly Bennett, his office manager and love interest, while conflicted with rescuing attractive babes who cross his path.

The 3rd in the Mike Angel Mysteries of complex, historical, erotic novels set in Chicago in 1962.