Lanterna Rally

Author: Michael Friedman

Publisher: Mockingbird-Books

Published: 2014-12-11

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 9780986011436

Detective Quinn Moosebroker arrived in the sleepy town of Clearview Terrace a broken man. A shoot out in the line of duty killed his partner and a second bullet ended his career with the Allentown Police Department. In his forced retirement, he lives with his daughter Kate and has become a Sunday painter. His one activity is the restoration of a 1946 wood-paneled Chrysler Town and Country and an occasional trip to the local used book shop run by Blake Knightly. Kate sets her father up on a blind date with the widow Betty Atwood to see a local play at a community theater. At the end of act one Pepper Bishop, owner of the Second Street Mystery Playhouse is murdered. Betty Atwood starts the beginning of the best first date in history and the best thing that has happened to her in the years since her husband's passing. The couples casual encounter quickly develops into a partnership that unveils a pornographers scheme to sell photographs of non-consenting Clearview Terrace ladies to a big city true-detective publisher. During Quinn and Betty's investigation Quinn bumps heads with the local authority in the form of Detective DeLaMonte a renegade dismissed from the New Orleans Police department. Eleanor Pennyworth finds Quinn Moosebroker's name in an address book with the word 'trusted' written in pencil. When her partner is found dead in his Clearview Terrace home, she calls in Quinn to investigate a missing literary manuscript known as Night of the Falling. Quinn and Betty find themselves in a world of book people and rare book treasures. Quinn relays a conversation about a young man's dream of murder to Betty he overheard on a quiet Saturday afternoon at the local barbershop. The story hits Betty so hard that while she tried to sleep that night she received a visitor in the form of a little boy at the foot of her bed. The haunting guest and Quinn's growing loyalty to Betty lead them to a government cover-up at a North Carolina Marine Corp Camp and to an aging Marine and his estranged wife. On the return home, along a cold dark southern highway, Betty adjusts the Town and Country's radio and a broadcast that correctly describes the night he was shot and his partner was killed sends them on a detour deep into a steel town and Quinn's past. The investigation undoes Dolan Ó Braonáin a local crime boss and exposes the far reaching tentacles of his organization. An innocent trip to the grand opening of a Clearview Terrace thrift store and an unexpected find send this detective duo skirting along the edges of stolen Nazi loot as they do their best to find the rightful owner of a piece of art that has survived all that has come its way. Clearview Terrace will never be the same.