Three Finders

The stories in this volume are grouped as three novellas about unusually precocious finders, or detectives, who must deal with paranormal beings and situations.

The first is Val Cassidy of the NYPD, an intrepid police detective who has more bullet holes in his body than the comic-book figure 'Fearless Fosdick'. In hospital recovering from his latest close call, Cassidy is attacked by a host of mob figures who want to finish their job of eliminating him, but fail. He discovers a talent of throwing darts at his enemies which is more effective than bullets. Then, with the help of his companion, Mabel Deuce, he takes on the alien 'scionites,' who make a practice of tearing asunder or winding their human victims in cocoons. Cassidy's old friend, John Fulghum, the Greater-Boston-area gumshoe, visits with his girlfriend newshound, Sylvia Blackwood, in the middle of his self-proclaimed war with the alien creatures. When the scionites return with a vengeance, the action-packed denouement involves the unusual services of the randy but brilliant Dr. Sundt of an unnamed classified US government agency.

The second finder is the talented American Indian named Wild Eagle, a former remote targeting specialist and black-world operator in the US military, who returns to the 'Navajo Nation' in the role of private investigator. On the border between corrupt law enforcers and organized criminals in the Southwest, this gumshoe seeks help from datura, the spirit of his murdered mentor and a Mexican illegal armed with a slingshot, to solve his case of cross-border human trafficking while evading serious attempts by the sheriff and his deputy to assassinate him.

The third finder is Daniel the Gleaner, a winged spirit tasked to harvest souls of corrupt humans with Siam his female Chinese partner, whom he mentors while she spies on him for the judicial hierarchy of gleaners. In spite of the constant threat of being condemned to Purgatory, Daniel's curiosity leads him to the knowledge that Siam is protecting the global criminal enterprise of her deceased father, also a gleaner, and her two living sisters. Further, Siam's arch enemy is the singularly corrupt judge among gleaners, who earns her just condemnation, paving the way for Daniel to become Siam's father's disciple and heir, but only after the Gleaner discovers the victim selection process has become utterly flawed from the time the cephalod Cthulhu departed from Earth.

Whether combatting mysterious alien scionites or employing spirit walking techniques to penetrate the wiles of law enforcers or deciphering the mysteries of an unnatural selection process for gleaners, these stories are unified by their exploration of the supernatural impacting a noir world of remarkable consistency.