The Two Fathers

November 26, 2020

The Two Fathers

The Two Fathers

Sam Dyke Investigations Book 11

by Keith Dixon

Genre: Mystery

Why does Jessica Hastings come home late several times a week?

Her husband asks Private Investigator Sam Dyke this simple question. Dyke doesn't want the case: he doesn't do divorce work ... but Brian Hastings doesn't want a divorce, he wants an explanation.

When Sam finds out what Jessica is doing, it opens up more questions. And when Brian Hastings goes missing, they're questions he feels compelled to answer.

At the centre of the mystery is a man who most people in Manchester don't know--Larry Stone. But those who do know him, know that far from being the simple florist he seems to be, he's actually the biggest crook in town. He's powerful, he's dangerous, and he's currently working a deal with a Dutchman who's even worse.

And Sam is now caught in Stone's sights as he works to find Brian Hastings, to solve a couple of murders, and to prevent Stone corrupting even more members of his own family than he already has.

Before the biggest deal of Stone's crooked career goes down.

In my line of work it’s not good to hear a knock on your door at eleven o’clock at night. It sends all kinds of images scampering through your imagination and plucking your nerve ends.
But the knuckle-rap was tentative, faintly rhythmic, and suggested an approach by someone who didn’t want to punch my lights out or stick a gun in my stomach.
Both of which I’d experienced at one time or another.
Perhaps, I thought, it was someone selling water purifiers or de-icer sprays and trying a novel sales approach.
Given what was to happen later, perhaps I should have wished harder for either of these options to be true.
Whoever it was knocked again, this time a little louder. I walked from my lounge to the front door and stood a moment. A real private investigator would have had a spy-hole and taken the opportunity to peer through it, or would have strapped on his shoulder holster before drawing back three bolts on the door. I suppose it says something about my professionalism that I did neither.
I turned the knob and pulled the door open.
A slight man a little older than me, perhaps fifty, stood shivering in a dark suit, the knot of his woollen tie pulled away from his scrawny neck. He glanced up at me as though I’d taken him by surprise, and I caught in that glance a universe of suspicion, fear and resentment. He was reasonably good-looking, with short fair hair greying at the temples and a small, pointed nose, and his head was set forward on his shoulders, giving him an air of hunched anticipation. His grey eyes looked past me into the house like a starving man looking at a heaving table of food, both greedy and somewhat resentful at the same time.

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Keith Dixon was born in Yorkshire and grew up in the Midlands. He's been writing since he was thirteen years old in a number of different genres: thriller, espionage, science fiction, literary. Two-time winner of the Chanticleer Reviews CLUE First in Category award for Private Eye/Noir novel, he's the author of eleven full-length books and one short-story in the Sam Dyke Investigations series and two other non-crime works, as well as two collections of blog posts on the craft of writing.

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