And Then She Was Gone

A man of infinite social grace he isn't, but what former disgraced Oakland Police Detective Clarke Lantham lacks in high culture he makes up for with his ability to slip into any role he needs to to get the job done (which is probably why he got fired in the first place).Fortunately, the world needs private detectives. Unfortunately for Lantham, on this particular Saturday morning, "the world" consists of a fretful mother with a missing daughter, and the case she hires him for is about send reality staggering into the gutter like an eighty-year-old drunk.From the posh shadow of Mount Diablo to the kink clubs of San Francisco to the genetic engineering labs of Stanford, Clarke Lantham chases down pieces of the weirdest puzzle he's ever seen, all for the sake of a nineteen-year-old girl whose face he can't stop seeing every time he closes his eyes.Approximately 60,000 words.