New Release & Excerpt – Negative Girl by Libby Cudmore
Synopsis
For fans of Cottonmouths by Kelly J. Ford comes Negative Girl: an evocative, moody, neo-noir thriller that explores obsession and people dying across America’s forgotten spaces. Martin Wade lived hard in his youth, but unlike many of his former bandmates and roadie friends, he didn’t die young. Instead, he hit the recovery path, cleaned up his life, and became a private investigator in a dying city in upstate New York.
When his heavily tattooed and scarred assistant Valerie sets up an appointment with a young woman who needs help keeping her biological father away from her, none of the three realize that the father is Martin’s old bandmate, still using and on a destructive path that will soon be headed straight for Martin’s clean life. As Martin struggles, Valerie becomes increasingly obsessed with their new client’s life.
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Excerpt
VALERIE
Martin had a migraine. I was fighting sleep at my desk with my third cup of coffee and games on my phone. We’d been out until 3am last night on the Russell case, making quiet conversation over the late-night jazz station while we took bets on who was using the family lake house without permission. I had guessed partying teens, or a family of clever raccoons, but it turns out it was Mr Russell and one of his students using the place for a little after-hours tutoring. After a year with the Wade Agency, Perrine’s only licensed private detective agency, I should have guessed as much. Martin would meet with Dr Russell later in the week and go over the photos with her. I think it was a combination of muggy September weather and lack of sleep and a little bit of dread that left him useless, locked in his office with the lights off and a cold rag over his eyes. The day after a stakeout was always brutal.
I’d come back to Perrine two years ago under what my brother Deacon called “mysterious circumstances,” arrived in Upstate New York after a three-day bus ride, wearing my pajamas and jacket and Doc Martens, without even a phone charger. I’d moved back in with my Aunt Gina, slept in Deacon’s old bedroom, tended bar and wrote articles for the online music magazineHigh Wire. I met Martin on one such assignment; turns out the PI in the dusty little office above the vape shop on Becker Street used to be known as Basil Wise, infamous frontman of the French Letters, a brief flash of a band that was once destined to take their place in the post-punk court of jesters alongside The Smiths, The Replacements, U2 and R.E.M. I interviewed him and he brought me along on a couple of little cases, but in the end, I decided not to send in the article, let him keep his cover and instead joined the Wade Agency as his assistant. It was just part-time work at first, filing and taking appointments and going to the bank and post office, but in the last few months, he’d started letting me in on some of the secrets of the business, asking me to help with a tail or swap out a few hours of a motel surveillance mission so he could stretch his legs and get a bite to eat. He’d even let me take on a case when he had the flu.
Excerpted with permission from NEGATIVE GIRL by Libby Cudmore.
