When Wylie Lewis sells his half of the detective agency he owned to move into the house his grandfather willed him in the small town of Earlston, he expects he'll have work to do refurbishing and redecorating it. He doesn't expect that Garry Parish, the handsome restaurant owner who lives two doors down, would offer his assistance, as well as put him in contact with Carl, a handyman who could do most of the manual labor.<br><br>Wylie also doesn't expect to be the sheriff's prime suspect when Nelly, a young woman who works for Garry, disappears a week after Wylie arrives in town. As if that isn't bad enough, a second woman, Emma, vanishes a few days later.<br><br>Wylie, Garry, and Carl team up to try to locate them before the sheriff decides to arrest Wylie, but things take a deadly turn when they find Nelly's body. Will they be able to discover who the killer is in time to save Emma, while Wylie and Garry deal with their growing attraction to each other? Or will Wylie become the killer's next target, with deadly results?

New Man in Town

Wylie stood behind him, watching as he found an online map of the town that he could copy to his graphics editing program. “Put their names beside each house, and color code them,” he suggested before Garry got started.


“Private houses where they live alone and the ones who live with family or boyfriends, because we don’t know if he might go after them if he gets the chance. And then the women who rent apartments on Market, or in one of the apartment complexes.”


“You’re pretty smart about figuring out how to do things,” Carl said to Wylie.


“It comes from having been a detective, even though I never faced something like this.”


“No murders? You weren’t a second Sam Spade?”


Wylie snorted. “Not even close.” He returned his attention to what Garry was doing. “Interesting. Several of them live away from the center of town, and I don’t mean the four in the complex of Lower Earlston Lane. How many on the list do you know?”


Chapter 34