Honor Kills (Angelina Bonaparte Mysteries)
Hard Boiled Mystery
3rd in Series
Dark Chocolate Press LLC (March 14, 2018)
Paperback: 284 pages

Synopsis

Did honor force him to abandon his wife and kids? Or is he just a weasel?

Six years ago, Marcy Wagner hired PI Angelina Bonaparte to find her missing husband Hank, who cleaned out their bank accounts and disappeared. Then Angie finds his obituary in an upstate newspaper. Marcy wants to know what why he abandoned her and the kids. Angie does, too!

She embarks on a mission that will blow the lid off Hank’s hidden life and reveal the reasons he ran. Was he a lowdown skunk? Or did he do the honorable thing when he left? Angie follows a twisted path to the truth and discovers that it lies perilously close to her own family life.

Guest Post

A Detective Needs a Community

by Nanci Rathbun

I love a good thriller, but one thing they rely on is the solitary life of the protagonist. Consider Jason Bourne–cast adrift by the organization that trained him to be a killing machine. Or the Grey Man, Court Gentry, either on the run from the CIA or acting for them, unable to stop moving long enough to forge bonds with others. Even Beatrix Rose, on the hunt for the daughter her MI6 employers ripped from her arms, lives in hiding, trusting no one.

Mysteries seem to bounce in the opposite direction. A good mystery, in my opinion, needs a cast of supporting characters. What would Sherlock be, without Watson’s spark of humanity? Or Kinsey Millhone, without her octogenarian landlord, Henry?

I love a character-driven plot, so I suppose it’s not strange that my private investigator, Angelina Bonaparte (Boe-nah-par-tay, please. She’s Sicilian-American and insists on the proper pronunciation), lives and moves within what is essentially an ensemble cast.

Papa is a first-generation American, who wants his only child to give up her PI business. “Why do you want to do this work?” he asks her. “You have a good degree, be a librarian, for God’s sake. That’s a proper job for a woman.” But as irritating as his old-fashioned ideas are to Angie, who is, after all, an adult woman in her fifties, she realizes that they arise from his love for her and his concern for her safety. That doesn’t mean that she’s going to stop doing what she loves, though!

Bobbie Russell evolved from a bit part as an insurance office receptionist to a sidekick role as the series progressed. A gay man with Rock Hudson good looks, Bobbie’s a tad aimless when Angie first meets him. But he thrills at the idea of learning the PI trade himself. And he gets Angie, in a way that others in the story don’t necessarily do. He tells her, “You like the younger guys for the thrill, but it doesn’t last. You need an equal, Angie, not someone you can lead or, worse, intimidate. But a woman like you doesn’t find many single men who are your equal, right?”

He’s right, she doesn’t. And she’s seen too much of cheaters and liars in her investigation business and in her marriage to Bozo, to trust easily. “I have this little hang-up,” she tells us. “I won’t deal with dishonesty on a personal basis. Go figure, someone in my line of work! So I operate on the assumption that everyone is hiding something. I run credit checks and criminal and civil court searches on the men who ask me out. I watch them for signs of fooling around—scents they don’t normally wear, clothes changed in the middle of the day, long lunches when they can’t be called, lots of little clues that mean nothing and everything. I’m not proud of it, but I won’t be a fool again.”

And then there’s homicide Detective Ted Wukowski, whose arrogance raises Angie’s hackles the first time they meet. Six-foot even to Angie’s five-three, with a scowl of disapproval for anyone in the PI business, Wukowski challenges Angie within five minutes of meeting her in Truth Kills: “You know the rules, lady. You can lose your license for withholding evidence of a crime.” Of course, Angie’s not going to back down: “That’s right, Detective. But the last I heard, running around on your wife isn’t a crime. It’s dishonest and lowdown and immoral, but if I had to report everyone I knew who cheated, the streets would be pretty empty.”

I love to flesh out the bit players as much as I do the ongoing supporting cast. In Honor Kills, one of my favorites is Augusta, an elderly woman who lives in a nursing facility where the man whom Angie’s been searching for died. Augusta’s got spunk and she’s nobody’s fool. Bobbie describes his first meeting with her this way: “Angie, I love that lady! What a hoot! She had on a peacock blue knit dress and four-inch leopard print heels. She’s got it goin’ on, for sure.”

Of course, a good plot is essential in a mystery and I spend a lot of time working through the clues and circumstances of the case. But without characters the reader can identify with, whether they’re good guys or bad, the story is dry. I love Angie’s community and enjoy widening it in each book.

Excerpt

When Angie finds an online obituary for Hank Wagner, whom she’s been trying to locate for many months, Hank’s wife asks her to find out about Hank’s last days. Angie interviews Augusta, who lives in the nursing facility where Hank died.

“Augusta, as I told you, I’m trying to find out what happened in late December to a friend’s husband, Jim Beltran. He was in hospice care there. He had liver failure at a fairly young age, only forty-two.  Did you know him?”

“Not to say, knew. But I saw him in his room from time to time. He looked pretty bad, all skin and bones, and yellow. I knew he wasn’t long for this world.”

“Was there anything unusual about his death?”

She pursed her lips in thought. “Nooo. But it was odd, the same night he died, Karl went missing.”

“Karl?”

“Karl Jorgensen. A night attendant. Nice man. One of the few who took good care of us, at least as good as he could. He’d get an extra blanket or hold somebody’s hand if they were sad or scared. He’d come in and talk with me sometimes.” She chuckled. “Said he and I were the only ones in the place that still had our wits about us.”

“And he disappeared?”

“Mm-hmm. Odd, isn’t it? I knew Mr. Beltran had passed, because the funeral home sent the hearse for him and I saw the gurney in the hallway outside his door. Then their man wheeled it into the room, came out a few minutes later with the body all covered up and the paperwork lying on top, and Karl walked him to the door and waited until the hearse pulled away. When Karl saw me in the hallway, he came over and told me to go back to bed, sort of harsh-like. He never used that tone of voice before, in my hearing.” A look of surprised hurt passed over her face. “Then he went back into the dead man’s room. Never came out. Just disappeared.”

I felt my eyebrows rise high on my forehead in amazement. “He just walked out, in the middle of the night, and left the residents on their own?”

She nodded. “I got back in bed, after he chastised me, and never realized. The morning crew was mighty put out that he abandoned his duties, and that he wasn’t there to give his report. Mrs. Rogers was on her high horse about it, too. I heard her berating the poor charge nurse about staff responsibility. But really, what did she have to do with it?”

“How very odd,” I said, wondering what the connection was to Jim-Hank, if any. “What did Karl look like?”

“Well, dear, he didn’t look like a Karl. You’d expect a blond-haired, blue-eyed Scandinavian, with a name like that. But he had dark hair and a dark complexion, too. Stood maybe five-ten. He was stocky, but it was muscle, not fat. I saw him lift some of the heavy residents with ease, more than once.”

“If you saw him on the street, what kind of work would you think he did?”

She thought for a moment. “Bartender.  Because, first, he was good at managing multiple tasks; second, he looked like he could handle himself in a fight; and third, he had a way with people, calming them if they were upset, listening if they were sad, helping with things like a checkbook that wouldn’t balance.” She grimaced. “I never was good at arithmetic.”

“Did you ever see him in street clothes?”

“Oh, my, I felt so sorry for him the one time I did that I tried to offer him money. He looked just like a hobo—I guess nowadays you’d say ‘homeless person.’ But he wouldn’t take a penny, said he had nicer things, but there was no sense wearing them to walk to the Manor in the dead of night. He didn’t want to get mugged. So I let it go. But I’m not sure I believed him.”

“I don’t suppose you have a picture of him?”

She shook her head. “No. Sorry, Angie … but there would be one in the office. The staff all wear picture IDs.” She leaned forward. “I could try to get in there for you and find it.”

I was horrified. “No!” She jumped back a bit. I gentled my tone. “No, please don’t do that, Augusta. It could be dangerous if you got caught.”

About the Author

Nanci Rathbun is a lifelong reader of mysteries – historical, contemporary, futuristic, paranormal, hard-boiled, cozy … you can find them all on her bookshelves.  She brings logic and planning to her writing from a background as an IT project manager, and attention to characters and dialog from her second career as a Congregationalist minister.

Nanci grew up an Army brat, living in Germany, France, and Korea, as well as several states in the U.S. After her dad retired from the service, the family settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There, Nanci raised her daughter and son, while working at AT&T. She never expected to move, but when her second grandchild was on the way, she wanted to be closer. One of her greatest joys is hearing her three granddaughters shout ‘Nana’ when she comes in their front door in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Nanci’s Maltipoo, Teeny, and she now live in Wellington, Colorado. No matter where she makes her home, she will always be a Packers fan.

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