Queen City Corpse , livre ebook

Andrews UK - Dan Andriacco

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119 pages

English

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"Where do we hide the body?"This is the startling question that Jeff Cody and his wife, Lynda, hear during a wedding reception on the first night of the QueenCon mystery conference in Cincinnati. Not only are the whispered words unnerving, there is no one nearby to have spoken them.Jeff's brother-in-law, mystery writer and amateur sleuth Sebastian McCabe, discounts the puzzle with what seems to be a logical and reassuring explanation. But murder does come to QueenCon - and to a victim who seems to make no sense. Mac's usual freewheeling style of mystery-solving runs into a roadblock in the form of a homicide captain who has been his enemy since the seventh grade. So Jeff and Lynda wind up doing his legwork, and what they had expected to be a fun weekend is harder than any day at the office.Queen City Corpse shines with humor, bright writing, and memorable characterization, as well as the solid storytelling that caused best-selling novelist Bonnie MacBird to call Dan Andriacco "a master of mystery plotting."

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	04 septembre 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781787051423
Langue	English

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Queen City Corpse
A Sebastian McCabe - Jeff Cody Mystery
Dan Andriacco

2017 digital version converted and published by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
First edition published in 2017
© Copyright 2017 Dan Andriacco
The right of Dan Andriacco to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Any opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of MX Publishing.
MX Publishing
335 Princess Park Manor, Royal Drive,
London, N11 3GX
www.mxpublishing.com
Cover design by Brian Belanger

This book is dedicated to
Evelyn Herzog, ASH, BSI
friend of “the lads” and faithful reader of their chronicles

Prologue: Another Fine Mess
“Murdered! Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure.” This ain’t my first rodeo. “Look at the blood on his right temple.” I stood up and moved away so that Lynda could get a better view of the body.
My beloved being in no way squeamish, she looked. “Well, maybe he passed out and hit his head on the way down.”
“Do you see anything around here that could cause a hole like that during a fall?”
She looked about briefly and then shook her lovely head. There wasn’t much to see in the alcove. “No, I guess not. But killing him makes no sense at all.”
“It must have made sense to somebody. Remember that question, ‘Where do we hide the body?’ I guess this is the answer, although it’s a lousy one. This isn’t very hidden, except for the fact that you and I are the only living people on the floor at the moment.”
“So who are we supposed to call - hotel management or the police?”
Lynda wouldn’t have asked that question if she hadn’t been more discombobulated than she let on. Our duty as citizens to call 911 was clear. But I didn’t respond. Instead, I said, “Well, I must say this is another fine mess Sebastian McCabe has gotten us into!”
“That’s not fair, Jeff.” She rolled her eyes. I wasn’t looking at her to see this, but I know my Lynda. “Mac had nothing to do with you being here to begin with.”
“No, but he could have found the body instead of me!”
Fairness compels me to admit, however, that she had spoken the truth. Mac was innocent, this time. For the person who had set off the chain of events ultimately responsible for my unfortunate presence on the scene of the crime was Lynda Teal (Cody) herself, my dear spouse and light of my life.
That had been months before...

1. Dead Writer Walking
Rex Carter, Lynda’s favorite living mystery writer, was expected to soon lose that distinction. The living part, I mean. She informed me of this during cocktail hour in front of the fireplace at Chez Cody one cold winter day.
“He has lung cancer, and apparently in the last stages.” She sipped her Manhattan. “I read about it on Facebook today. And the hot rumor is that he’s killing off St. George to end the series on his way out.”
I said a silent prayer of gratitude that Lynda had sworn off cigarettes some years before - silent because my frequent health warnings in her smoking days had not been well received. In fact, they had contributed to a regrettable hiatus in the Cody-Teal love story. So, instead of venturing into touchy territory, I said:
“Good riddance. About the end of the character, I mean.”
Maybe you’ve read some of Carter’s many Ian St. George thrillers. Even if you haven’t, you probably know through general pop culture awareness that St. George is a British bloke who wears a black eyepatch and solves mysteries while elegantly freeloading his way through life - part Robin Hood and part vigilante. His anti-heroic charm had always eluded me. For one thing, eyepatches always remind me of Dr. Evil’s assistant in Austin Powers . For another, I always thought the St. George setup was a bit gimmicky, especially his walking stick. Its inner workings changed from book to book, depending on what St. George needed it to be - gun, flask, leaded bludgeon, and so forth. Too clever by half, I say.
“Well, I like the character a lot,” Lynda retorted, her husky voice pouty but cute. “And I like Carter’s style. I’d love to see him at QueenCon before he passes. It’s going to be so close to us this year, Jeff. Wouldn’t it be fun to go?”
So, that was it!
The eleventh annual edition of QueenCon, the mystery convention named for Golden Age of Mystery icon Ellery Queen, was coming to Cincinnati in the spring. And the Queen City of the West, as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had called it long ago, is only forty miles downriver from our little town of Erin. Sebastian McCabe, my brother-in-law and best friend, grew up there - to the limited extent that he ever grew up at all.
“Mac’s mom could watch Donata for a couple of days.”
Our darling daughter was just over a year old that winter and of an amiable disposition. She already favored her mother’s looks, with the same curly hair of a honey-blond hue.
“So what do you think?” Lynda prodded, looking at me over the cocktail glass with the full force of her gold-flecked brown eyes.
I’d been married long enough not to point out that she’d asked a second question without giving me time to answer the first. So I considered the matter of attending QueenCon XI, but not for long. A relaxing weekend away from home could be just the thing Lynda needed right now. She’d been under a lot of work stress lately. Speculation ran rampant in the financial press that her employer, the Grier Media Group, would split its print and broadcast operations into separate companies. Gannett, Scripps, and other media giants had already done that, to plaudits from Wall Street. My darling’s job as a sort of circuit rider for news quality at Grier Ohio NewsGroup took her into the newsrooms of both newspapers and TV stations, so an uncoupling of the two at Grier could make her an unemployment statistic. She didn’t talk much about this sword of Damocles, but I knew that it was hanging over her.
“Yes, it would be fun to go,” I said, “and I think we should do it. I’ve never been to QueenCon or Bouchercon, although I went to Magna cum Murder in Indiana years ago.”
Lynda put down her Manhattan, joined me on the aptly named love seat, and expressed her gratitude in a non-verbal manner.
“Maybe this will inspire you to write mysteries again,” she said after a few moments.
“Who knows?” But I doubted it. I hadn’t thought much about my seven - or was it eight? - unpublished Max Cutter private eye novels in quite a while. Banging my ahead against a closed door had lost its appeal for me some time back. I had made peace with the fact that I would never be a successful fiction writer like Mac, whose soft-boiled Damon Devlin amateur sleuth mysteries sold as fast as he could write them. Between my day job as communications director of St. Benignus University and evenings and weekends chronicling the adventures of Sebastian McCabe, I keep busy enough.
“At any rate,” I added, “I know that Mac and Kate are going as usual. In fact, Mac’s on the host committee. We can carpool and save money on the gas.” My sister (the “Kate” half of Mac and Kate) is an artist by training and profession. She isn’t much of a mystery reader but she’s her husband’s greatest fan.
I picked up my tablet from the coffee table and accessed the QueenCon website to begin the registration process. It was a fairly glitzy site, with a sizeable picture of Rex Carter on the home page. But Carter wasn’t the main focus of the conference hoopla.
“No way!”
“What?” Lynda leaned forward. I love it when she does that.
“Edward Seton. I thought he was dead, but look.” I turned the tablet her way. “He’s the guest of honor.”
“He must be somebody special if he’s the GOH. How come I never heard of him?”
“A lot of people haven’t, I guess, but I loved the private eye novels he wrote in the 1950s and ’60s. His shamus’s name was Jason Darke.”
“Sounds shady.”
I was too busy waxing nostalgic to comment on my beloved’s wordplay. “I must have read a dozen or more of the Darke books in college, one right after the other, when I should have been studying Russian history or Greek and Roman drama. They always wound up involving commies or Nazis plotting a comeback, stuff like that. I have the impression that Seton’s work lost popularity around the time of the Vietnam War, even though he kept writing for a while. He must be about a hundred by now.”
Not quite. My favorite search engine quickly turned up a bio that showed he was only ninety-two and had recently lost a leg to diabetes. “His work is now being made available to old and new readers in retro editions from Rue Morgue books, starting with The Stainless Steel Trap and End Game ,” I read aloud from Wikipedia. “More are scheduled.”
“You sound excited.”
“Let’s just say there’ll be something for both of us at this convention,” I said as I completed the registration form and “Liked” the QueenCon page on Facebook.
In my enthusiasm for an old favorite writer, I didn’t even notice what was on the agenda for the conference’s opening night reception.
“Edward Seton doesn’t get enou