Book description
Former Chief Warrant Officer Sam Blackman lost a leg in Iraq and
emerged from the V. A. hospital in Asheville, NC, as a bitter civilian
without a job or a future. But when he solved a series of local murders,
Sam not only brought the guilty to justice but found meaning for his
life. Now he and his partner, Nakayla Robertson, are opening a detective
agency. They have high hopes that the thriving mountain region will
provide a steady stream of cases. Their first client, a quirky elderly
woman in a retirement community, makes a strange request. She wants Sam
to right a wrong she committed more than 70 years ago. Her victim was F.
Scott Fitzgerald. Her crime was stealing a manuscript. Sam's task seems
simple enough: retrieve the woman's lockbox and deliver the manuscript
to Fitzgerald's heirs. But nothing is simple for Sam. The lockbox is
sealed with a swastika, a symbol his client insists predates the Nazis
and reflects a scene from The Great Gatsby. Then a security guard is
killed and the lockbox disappears. Not only has this investigation
triggered a murder, but Sam's final military case has followed him from
Iraq and neither he nor anyone close to him is safe. Are the mysteries
connected? Or is one a ruse luring him into the crosshairs of his
enemies? At the start of de Castrique's winning second Sam Blackman
mystery (after 2008's Blackman's Coffin), the former U. S. military CID
officer and his lover, Nakayla Robertson, are setting up a detective
agency in Asheville, N. C. Their eccentric first client, Ethel Barkley,
wants them to retrieve a lockbox she claims contains a purloined F.
Scott Fitzgerald manuscript. Soon after Sam and Nakayla take possession
of the sealed box, someone steals it from their office, killing a
security guard in the process. The theft may be part of an attempt to
maintain secrecy of an American fascist organization that flourished in
the 1930s-or it may be rooted in the immediate past, as rogue Blackwater
mercenaries (who cost Sam a leg in Iraq) come after the loot they
imagine he stole from them. Ethel's subsequent murder raises the stakes.
Readers will hope to see a lot more of the book's amiable characters, in
particular, Sam and Nakayla, whose comfortable banter lends the story
much of its charm. Mark de Castrique grew up in the mountains of
western North Carolina where his mysteries are set. Mark is a veteran of
the television and film production industry, and he serves as an adjunct
professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Dangerous
Undertaking is the first in the series
