Nostalgia City Mystery #5
Mystery
Date Published: 03-13-2025
Publisher: Archer & Clark
A public war between a governor and a theme park lights the fuse on a story of hate groups, murder, corruption, racism, and political espionage.
Ex-cop turned theme-park cab driver Lyle Deming finds the body of a park visitor during an LGBTQ event. The dead man catered gay weddings. Was it a hate crime?
Arizona governor Rod Gudgel, running for reelection, calls it a random shooting. He mocks Nostalgia City theme park for its inclusiveness, uses homophobic and racist slurs, and later challenges the safety of its rides.
Park CEO, “Max” Maxwell lambasts the governor’s prejudice and insensitivity, and the fight is on—in public and undercover. Maxwell drafts Lyle to investigate the murder while Kate Sorensen, his 6’-2½” public affairs VP, goes on the offensive in the media.
When an assault rifle attack kills and injures park employees demonstrating for gay rights at a Gudgel campaign office, Nostalgia City mourns, and Kate slams the governor’s unsympathetic response to the slaughter. While the FBI and sheriff’s deputies investigate the crime, the governor redoubles his efforts to regulate the park out of business.
Looking for a shooting suspect, Lyle gets a little too close to an armed hate group—with a possible connection to the governor. His lady friend Kate flies to Montana where she digs into the governor’s unseemly past uncovering a trail of malfeasance dating back two decades and arousing Gudgel allies who want to stop her at all cost.
With Lyle’s wry humor and Kate’s stick-to-itiveness the story moves quickly as mysteries and subplots multiply and loop together threatening the park, their relationship, and their lives.
Excerpt: The Woke and The Dead
CHAPTER 12
April 5
Kate heard popping sounds and almost simultaneous screams. Bullets crashed through picket signs, crashed through windows, crashed through flesh.
Seconds before, she’d passed a line of gay rights demonstrators marching in front of Governor Gudgel’s new Polk campaign headquarters. When Kate walked into the office, the shooting began.
She dropped to the floor as the storefront picture window shattered and a coffee machine at the back of the room exploded. Somewhere in Kate’s mind, terror mixed with split-second knowledge that the prospect of being shot by a lunatic with an assault weapon had become part of American life. Would this be her final thought?
The shots continued rapidly, pop, pop, pop, one after another. Then stopped.
Kate stayed glued to the floor, along with the half dozen office workers. She listened. Sounds eerily similar to moans from the park’s zombie ride drifted in through the broken window. More than a minute without gunfire passed before she dared to raise up on hands and knees, keeping her head low. A man in the corner held his arm, attempting to staunch the blood that soaked his sleeve. Kate’s first impulse was to crawl over to him, but two other people, crouching low, inched to him with towels to stop the bleeding. After another frozen minute, a siren.
When a chorus of sirens sounded, Kate raised up enough to peer through the splintered window out to the street. A sheriff’s car skidded to a stop. Its doors flew open. Two deputies, one armed with a semi-automatic rifle, jumped out and scanned the surrounding buildings. Across the street more black and whites arrived. Uniformed officers dashed up and down the opposite sidewalk.
An ambulance braked to a stop. EMTs leaped out carrying gear. Kate stood up and took tentative steps to the door, her senses on hair-trigger alert.
She stepped outside, gagged, and turned away. Three of the LGBTQ picketers and a sheriff’s deputy lay on the ground, surrounded by blood.
About the Author
My first three mysteries were published by Black Opal Books with my debut novel earning recommendation from the American Library Association.
I started writing mysteries after a writing career in journalism and marketing. Prior to my novels, Ether Books of the UK published a collection of my flash fiction mysteries and many of my shorts have been published in online literary magazines. During my business career I wrote two books for John Wiley and Sons, one of which was a Library Journal Best Business Book of the Year. I have an MA in journalism and a golden retriever.
I write the kind of mysteries I like to read. I appreciate stories with twists, turns, and puzzles which appeal to the head. But I also like a mystery that appeals to the heart with a fast pace and challenges and threats that put the protagonists in peril.
Contact Links
Twitter: @baconauthor
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