Duck Darley

Once a competitive swimmer destined for Olympic gold, Duck Darley is now barely scraping by as an unlicensed PI, chasing down cheating spouses for the same Manhattan elite who once viewed him as equal . . . Duck's lost glory days resurface when he's hired to track down the teenaged sister of a former teammate turned Olympic champion. Privileged Madeline McKay vanished over Labor Day weekend, leaving behind a too-perfect West Village apartment and a promising athletic career of her own. Duck thinks he's hunting for a self-destructive runaway-until Madeline's film student ex is savagely murdered, and the media spins her as the psycho who killed him. As Duck searches for Madeline, he's plunged back into the dark underbelly of Olympic swimming-a world rife with wild lies and terrible violence. And he soon learns that no matter how hard he tries to escape his past, demons still lurk beneath every surface . . .

Perched in an airy penthouse above the corrupt streets of Manhattan, unlicensed P.I. Duck Darley has settled into an unlikely domestic routine with a wealthy divorcée and her precocious eight-year-old son. But old nightmares return when a desperate text from Cass Kimball, the former partner Duck once took a bullet to protect, lures him back into sworn-off vices and the sinister world of professional sports... Cass cries murder after her boyfriend tumbles to his death in the Catskills while researching the tragic doping experiments that changed the lives of East German Olympic athletes during the Cold War. Following the brutal killing of a champion javelin thrower, Cass herself is arrested on charges of double homicide, leaving Duck on an impossible quest for answers while doubting everything he ever believed about his secretive sidekick... Now, caught between the secret horrors of extreme performance enhancement and shadowy criminals who stalk him relentlessly, it's sink or swim as Duck stumbles through a reckless investigation that endangers both his life and that of anyone he allows himself to hold dear.