Elevator: A Dack Willman Mystery

by Scott Mercer

Dack Willman plays the detective game in Los Angeles in the 1940’s. Hard to scratch out a living when you’re competing for customers with Philip Marlowe and Mike Hammer, but he puts his sweat, blood and guts into it. Too bad a citywide power outage during the hottest summer in years hits him where it he finds himself trapped in a stuck elevator with seven other passengers, including his close friend and “researcher” Palmer Patterson. The power goes out. The elevator stops. The lights go black. When they come back on, Palmer is dead. Who did it, and why? Or even how? Dack has to summon up the most potent powers of observation and deduction in his possession to solve this one. Can Dack dissect the identities of the passengers and their hidden motivations? And can he escape this claustrophobic trap before the murderer strikes again?

"A delightful mashup of a hard-boiled noir ala Chandler or Hammett and an English cozy locked-room puzzle-mystery ala Agatha Christie."

156 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 3, 2012