Frank Cole Mystery
2 primary works • 4 total works
Book 1
Frank Cole is residing temporarily in a rickety cottage in Exile, Florida. His company has gone bankrupt, and the judge has ruled without precedent that any money Frank earns before the claims are settled will be treated as part of the bankruptcy. Frank's lawyer cautions him to earn as little as possible until then, so Frank gets a job as an insurance company's lowly fact-checker. The challenges of the job escalate abruptly, however, when he is called to investigate the hit-and-run death of a young man. Frank's natural curiosity leads him to look more carefully into the accident than is expected of him. When he becomes convinced that the "accident" not only was murder, but that the victim was mistaken for the actual target, whom he somewhat resembles, Frank has opened the gate to a quagmire of dirty dealings in Exile's major money-making industry. He's duty bound to prove the corruption, if he can manage to stay alive.
Book 4
Fact-checker Frank Cole is moonlighting as the evening dispatcher for the Midnight Taxi Service. It is a quiet spring break in the Florida Panhandle until a nervous teenage boy flags down a Midnight cab near a parking lot full of flashing police lights. The next evening, suspicious strangers start appearing at the taxi stand, asking Frank about the boy and where he was headed. The ride speeds up shortly after. The driver who took the fare disappears, the teenager's strange past is revealed, and a dead body turns up holding a Midnight Taxi Service roadmap. Of course, what this all sums up to is simple: Once again Frank has to answer questions about a dead guy he never even met in life.
The Exile town bank is in trouble, and Chief Dannon asks for Frank's help. The bank has lost track of some of its safe deposit customers, and Frank has to contact the missing box-holders before auditors shut the bank down.Frank quickly discovers that outdated records are just the tip of the iceberg. First, an impostor posing as the husband of a vacationing box-holder tricks his way into the safe deposit area. Then Frank learns that the box's owner, Dorothea Free-hoffer, died in a household accident just a few days earlier - and that her husband is long dead.The questions start piling up and in no time as all Frank is knee-deep in land fraud, identity theft, and an accident that looks an awful lot like murder. Par for the course, when living in Exile.