North Country Girl (Fuzzy Koella, Book 2) by Anthony DeCastro

Release date: January 17, 2019

Subgenre: Hard-boiled Mystery

About North Country Girl: 

 

Voices from the past are best left there.

Myrtle Beach PI Fuzzy Koella knows this better than anyone.

But when his old teammate Jo Jo Bigtree calls about a young vagabond accused of murdering a nun, Fuzzy doesn’t heed that advice.

In the frigid landscape of Upstate New York, Fuzzy finds a town with a penchant for violence and dark secrets. An abusive high school hockey coach. A Voodoo doctor. A corrupt Tribal Sheriff. Even his own friend and the good Sister, herself.

As the temperature drops and the body count rises, Fuzzy questions the wisdom of sticking around to catch another bullet. Or worse, freezing to death. But a scared kid sits in jail that nobody seems to care about except Fuzzy.

Fuzzy Koella returns in his second, exciting adventure. If you love witty detective novels with a dose of hard-boiled action, you won’t want to miss North Country Girl.

 

Excerpt:

 

Chapter One

The night after Christmas, I spent sitting in my truck in the parking lot of a barbecue joint across the street from a rundown convenience store called The Whiz. The night was pleasant. I had the window down to enjoy the crisp air and the lingering aroma of smoked meat and the chatter of middle America visiting The Whiz for their post-holiday beer, junk food, and lottery tickets.  I hated stakeouts, but the stars in the skies, memories of gift giving with my girlfriend, and the fading pain from my last bullet wound kept this old bear in the yuletide spirit.

Old bear.

That’s what Veronica called me.  Old bear.  I’d never asked her how old she was.  I was too smart for that.  I am a private investigator after all.  But she seemed only a couple years younger than me.  Yet, I was her old bear.

I was employed by an Indian-American entrepreneur named Hab Singh, who owned five other Whiz’s throughout the Strand. Someone had vandalized all his stores with anti-Muslim graffiti over the last couple of months.  Mr. Singh did not understand why, he, a Sikh, was being attacked with anti-Muslim hate.  I understood perfectly.

People were stupid.

I had staked out three different stores over the last week. No luck.  Fortunately, no other attacks had happened during that time. I planned this stakeout to be at the store less than a mile from my home the night after Christmas.

When the store lights shut off after midnight, I took more interest in observing the building. A few minutes later, the clerk appeared from around the back of the store in a twenty-year-old, gray Chevy Celebrity sedan.  He signaled right and turned onto Business Highway 17 towards Myrtle Beach.  The action died at the Whiz with his fading tail lights.

Two hours later, I spotted movement in the vegetation behind the store.  I pulled across the street with my headlights off and slid past the south side of the building.  As my truck nosed around the corner, the tires crunched on the remains of a broken beer bottle.

They crouched with spray cans poised at the back door.  Two of them. Dressed in black. Wearing ski masks.  They looked in my direction and sprung to their feet and sprinted to the safety of the woods.

I threw the gearshift into park, and jumped out of the truck.  I hit full speed within a few steps.  When I hit the woods, however, I faced the challenge of running in the dark through a path carved by people a lot shorter than six and a half feet.  I soldiered on.

Branches lashed out at my cheeks.  Sensing a disaster that could end up with me blinded, I held my right hand out in front of me to ward off the danger.  Within seconds, thorny brambles bloodied my hand.

I could not see my prey, but the trees were alive with their passing.  I continued in their direction.  Just as I felt the cold clench of exhausted lungs, the branches ahead went dormant.

I should have heeded that warning.

 

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About Anthony DeCastro:

Anthony DeCastro is a life-long fan of detective fiction. He has designed religious facilities where thousands of people worship every weekend, managed the construction of industrial factories for a multi-national corporation, and played minor league baseball for three weeks. Through all of it he has written. He figures it’s time to let the world read his stories. Everything is Broken is his first novel.

 

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