Böcker av Robb White

Thomas Haftmann didn't recognize the word Saraband when the girl said it. He had to look it up: "a stately court dance from the eighteenth century in "slow triple time." Haftmann was a down-on-his-luck private eye with an ex-wife and debts, so he did skiptracing for a local bondsman. But then he takes an assignment to go to Florida to retrieve a runaway girl, a scholarship student named Raina Toivela. This job, I thought, will be easier than most. However, the assignment doesn't go as smoothly as he'd hoped. That's all too often the case for a private eye. Welcome to his world!

Ex-cop Thomas Haftmann, formerly of Cleveland Homicide, works as a private investigator in the resort town of Jefferson-on-the-Lake. You will follow his cases in these 15 short neo-noirs. Among them are "The Kneeling Woman," "Ni Escape, No Turning Back," "The Riding Boy," "The Slave Master's Dungeon," "Archangel's Daughter," "A Woman With Tea-Colored Eyes," and "The Dog Returneth to His Vomit." These have been collected from a variety of outstanding publications and blog sites, ranging from Powder Burn Flash to A Twist of Noir to Sex and Murder Magazine. Get ready to know Thomas Haftmann's dark world of murder and madness.

Here we encounter the controlled madness of two men, one a former cop, the other a misfit and killer of women. The ex-cop Thomas Haftmann, formerly of Cleveland Homicide, is recently divorced and working as a private investigator in the resort town of Jefferson-on-the-Lake. Barely surviving financially, and haunted by his own twin demons of gambling and alcohol, Haftmann gets swept up in the statewide manhunt for a killer who meets women on swingers' Internet sites and kills them. Ohio police are finding headless bodies displayed in bizarre poses. Sensationalized in the tabloid press as the "Jack-in-the-Box Killer for leaving severed heads at murder scenes, Lonnie Dale Nelson carries with him a voice in his head (his "angel) that grows stronger as his madness intensifies over the course of the year-long manhunt. And Haftmann's own mental instability is accelerating as the trail leading to Nelson grows warmer.