Frank Clemons Mystery

The young girl lies in a ditch without a scratch on her--a white high school student stretched out dead in the black part of Atlanta. She was a rich girl from a cold family, too genteel for the neighborhood where she died, and only the baby in her belly suggests how she might have gotten there. For Detective Frank Clemons, the scene is far too familiar. Too close to how it was when he found his own daughter, dead in the woods by her own hand, her youthful beauty cruelly ravaged by depression. Her suicide ended his marriage and sent him on a downward spiral that has nearly claimed his own life. To hang on to sanity, he must do everything he can to find justice for the dead.

The sleek high-rises of Park Avenue make Frank Clemons uneasy. The former Atlanta homicide detective came to New York after a sickening murder case soured him on the South, but despite the glitz and excitement of his new surroundings and the beauty of the woman he shares them with, the city makes his skin crawl. Now a private eye, he is only at ease in the city's darker corners, among the whores, gamblers, and pimps who call Eighth Avenue home. That affinity for the socially isolated is what draws him to the case of Hannah Karlsberg, an elderly seamstress who deserved a better death than she got. Hannah's employer hires Clemons to find the victim's next of kin so the police can release the body for burial, but as he learns about the dead woman's past, which stretches back to the Lower East Side sweatshops of the 1930s, Clemons becomes obsessed with unearthing the decades-old secret that led to her death.

The first case seems simple. A wealthy man's wife has grown distant, and he asks Frank Clemons, a private eye hardened by his past work on Atlanta's homicide beat, to find out why. There are a number of reasons why a young woman might withdraw from her older husband, but the spurned spouse rejects them all. Her jewelry is disappearing, but he insists that she doesn't have trouble with blackmail, drugs, or gambling. The answer must be more complex, and he begs Frank to find out what it is. Meanwhile, an old woman familiar to Frank from his nights haunting Tenth Avenue has been murdered, and a gypsy priestess claims that she killed her. But Frank is unconvinced, and unearthing these women's secrets will force him deep into the dark side of a city that he still cannot call home.