The Chase

Detroit, 1964. A man is shot dead forty feet from the Masonic Temple with a brass key in his pocket.

The key opens a room. The room holds a ledger. The ledger points to the headwaters of a corruption network that detective John Braun has been tracing for four years.

Victor Sava is found in his Buick Skylark on Temple Avenue, two bullets center-mass, professional. In his pocket: a brass key tagged "714." The key leads Braun inside the Detroit Masonic Temple - seventeen stories of Gothic limestone, a thousand rooms - to a hidden financial ledger documenting years of money laundering through the Shrine's charity events.

But the bookkeeper who decoded it all has fled. Nikos Karides is somewhere on the Detroit River with a Woolworth's notebook worth more than his life, and the men who killed Sava are half a day behind.

Braun has his partner, his boat, and a weekend before the department buries him. The institution has attorneys, moles, and a thousand rooms to hide in. What neither side knows is that someone else has been listening - recording every decision from a radio room on the fourteenth floor.

The Chase is the third novel in The Braun Cases, a five-book series following John Braun through 1960s Detroit.