Title: Ashes to Ashes
Series: Aubrey Blake Thrillers, Book One
Author: Rachel Ford
Publisher: NineStar Press
Release Date: 06/28/2022
Pairing: Female/Female
Length: 93800
Genre: Contemporary, LGBTQIA+, contemporary, murder mystery, crime, lesbian, private detective, cleric/priest, guns, violence, anger issues, Action/adventure, bartenders, pets, religion, revenge, slow burn
Add to Goodreads
Description
A private eye and a vigilante priest face off to bring down a corrupt band of evildoers—by the book, or off the books. Her way, or his.
Years ago, Aubrey Blake joined the police force to make a difference. She almost lost everything in the pursuit of justice. Now she’s about to do it again.
Disillusioned with her former career, she makes a living as a private detective. A living, but not a life.
Then the killings start. The police are on it. But Blake can’t let it be. She can’t walk away. She’s not wired that way.
Then again, neither are the killers…
Ashes to Ashes
Rachel Ford © 2022
All Rights Reserved
At twenty-five years old, the human body was a machine in its prime. Maybe the perfect machine. According to the smart people of the world, the brain had fully matured by then. Or maybe it was at twenty-one or thirty. It depended on which study you read and which smart person you asked. But twenty-five was a nice number anyway, right in the middle of all the estimates. And it was the number they were working with. So Aubrey Blake went with it.
As far as the rest of a twenty-five-year old’s body—well, for most people, it would be in peak condition. The heart, the liver, and the lungs were the healthiest those organs would ever be. And barring some kind of high school or college sports injury, the knees and back hadn’t started feeling the impact of age yet.
No, twenty-five was pretty much as good as it got. It just goes downhill from there.
So maybe, Aubrey figured, that was why a twenty-five-year-old kid in the prime of his life would eat a bullet. Maybe he’d sat in that darkened room, the shades drawn on a bright, sunny morning, and thought about the next seventy years of his life and how it would all be downhill from there. Maybe he’d thought about three or four decades of eight-to-five shifts. Maybe he’d thought about thirty years of mortgages and car payments and PTA meetings. Maybe he’d thought about a lifetime of diets and gym memberships and watching his cholesterol and counting how many beers he drank.
“Maybe,” she said, “he was getting cold feet about the wedding.”
“Bullshit, Aubrey. You know that’s bullshit.” Andy Jefferson drummed his fingers on the desk in an aggravated rhythm.
She shrugged. Andy had been her old partner, back when they were on patrol, and they’d risen through the ranks side by side. They’d made detective within a month of each other, so they had the kind of history to know when one or the other was full of shit. And he was right. It did sound like bullshit, and Aubrey knew it. But the truth was she didn’t much care. “Maybe. But if the medical examiner thinks it was suicide, I don’t see what the problem is.”
“‘Consistent with.’ She said the injuries are ‘consistent with’ a suicide. Not that it was a suicide.”
“She would, though, wouldn’t she?”
“Not the point. I’m saying she didn’t rule out anything else.”
“What, you mean murder most foul?”
Andy frowned at her flippancy. “I’m telling you, that kid was murdered. And George Callaghan did it. I know he did it. I can feel it.”
Andy was an instincts guy. It used to piss her off because his instincts usually turned out to be dead-on. She sat back in a comfortable office chair and tapped a pen against her lower lip.
“Okay. But it seems to me there’s one glaring problem with your theory. You have no evidence.”
He didn’t respond to her sarcasm though. “It’s worse than that.”
“Really? You got someone else who confessed to it?”
A flicker of annoyance crossed his face. “No, Sherlock. He’s got an alibi. A solid alibi.”
Aubrey laughed. “Hell, Andy. This is one of those happy-ending cases. You’ve got a rapist who decided of his own accord to eat a bullet. Why are you looking for more?”
“Because he didn’t do it. I know I don’t have the evidence. But when I talked to the grandfather, I could tell he was guilty.”
“Did he say anything?”
“No, of course not. I tried everything I know to catch him in a lie or a contradiction. He’s sticking to his story. Damn guy’s unflappable, I’ll give him that. But I could see it in his eyes. He knew why I was there before I said a word.”
“Okay,” she said again. “And so what?”
“So what? He killed someone. What do you mean ‘so what?’”
“Say he did kill Morehouse. Hannah Callaghan is dead because of Tyler Morehouse. Tyler Morehouse is dead because of George Callaghan.” She shrugged again. “Seems like balance has been restored.”
“Jesus, Aubrey, that’s not the way this works.”
“Maybe not. Maybe it should be.”
He shook his head at her. “Look, I didn’t come here to have this argument all over again. Are you going to help me or not?”
Purchase
NineStar Press | Books2Read
Amazon
Award-winning author Rachel Ford is a software engineer by day, and a writer most of the rest of the time. She is a Trekkie, a video gamer, and a dog parent, owned by a Great Pyrenees named Elim Garak and a mutt of many kinds named Fox (for the inspired reason that he looks like a fox).
Facebook | Twitter
