Jack Starkey Mysteries
3 total works
A serial killer is on the loose in Naples, Florida, an enclave of wealth and privilege on the Southwest Gulf Coast. At first, the murders have been disguised as accidents, but when Police Chief Wade Hansen becomes suspicious, Mayor Charles Beaumont orders him to apprehend the killer before the truth becomes public knowledge. Hansen reaches out to retired Chicago homicide detective Jack Starkey. Starkey, who has been shot three times: twice on the job and once in the army, is enjoying every cop's retirement dream, but at the same time, misses the thrill of the hunt, so he accepts the job. As the bodies stack up like cordwood, Starkey searches for anything that the victims might have in common. He decides to go undercover as a member of the Naples elite in an attempt to get himself noticed by the killer, drawing the attention of Count Vasily Petrovich, who operates a hedge fund named for the Atocha, a Spanish galleon that sank in a hurricane off the Florida Keys in 1622. When Starkey discovers that all of the victims so far had been investors in that fund, and that the count is not a count at all, but a member of the Russian mafia he suspects that the Atocha Fund might have a substantial penalty for early withdrawal. Meanwhile, William Stevens, a Chicago Tribune police reporter, has been writing a series of best-selling crime novels based upon his pal Starkey's career. Starkey's alter-ego is Chicago homicide detective Jack Stoney. Things are not what they seem, plot twists abound, and the bullets begin to fly. Starkey, in desperation, reaches out to the fictional Stoney, to help him catch the killer.
"Retired Chicago homicide detective Jack Starkey is living what he calls every cop's retirement dream by owning a successful bar, The Drunken Parrot, and residing on a houseboat in Fort Myers Beach on Florida's Southwest Gulf Coast. Mostly, it s been working out just fine. Starkey's drink of choice these days is diet root beer and not the hard stuff that ended his marriage and sent him into rehab. He's dating the lovely Marisa Fernandez, who owns a real estate agency and supplements his usual diet of Pop-Tarts and diner food with gourmet Cuban cooking. But long-term serenity has never been Jack Starkey's destiny. One evening, Starkey's pal Cubby Cullen, the Fort Myers Beach police chief, comes into the Drunken Parrot to ask a favor. The Coast Guard found a sailboat drifting in Pine Island Sound with two dead bodies aboard, a bank president and his wife, both shot once in the forehead execution style. Murders are rare in town; Cubby asks Jack, who has more homicide experience than anyone in the local police department, to take a look at the crime scene just to offer an opinion. Starkey agrees, not realizing that this will draw him into an investigation involving offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, a Russian oligarch, and the angry father of a boy who's not getting much playing time on his Little League team. Even in his prime, Starkey would be hard-pressed to find a connection, and his prime is in his rearview mirror. This mystery follows in the tradition of John D. MacDonald, Carl Hiaasen, Lawrence Sanders, and other masters of crime fiction marked by compelling characters, stories with completely unexpected twists and turns, and a strong comic element that will keep a reader thoroughly amused while wondering what could possibly happen next"--