Welcome to Tomorrow

Welcome to Tomorrow is book one of a trilogy involving the Martinez Detective Agency. A day never passes without a story of violence in the news, a mother killing her kids, a child killing the parent, parents beating up on each other. And yet, how many of these stories go unreported? Abuse often forces women to leave home and husbands to disappear into the night. How many women endure abuse, suffers a life-changing injury, ending up homeless, with no memory of who she is? Eleanor Parker is such a woman.Poverty cannot be the only culprit. The rich engage in spousal abuse, perhaps as frequently as the middle and lower classes.Thanks to Eleanor's father's fortune, she lives in a $20M house, a wedding gift from him. Unfortunately, Eleanor's husband, Brad comes from a family of spendthrifts, and like them, money goes through his fingers like quicksilver. Thus, Eleanor is financially indispensable. Brad uses her money to start a business but within a few years, it goes bust -- again she loans him the money to start another business. This time things are different, it succeeds but still the abuse continues. At first he would yell, insult and humiliate her, but soon, open-handed slaps were the norm. Then one night his fists take over. On a cold November night she is knocked unconscious, and when she wakes, she has wandered out of the house and through town. A NYC cabdriver finds her by the side of the road and takes her to Bellevue Hospital. Eleanor's memory is gone. She's lost everything with one angry blow. No one came forward to claim her, and when she leaves the rehab unit the name she takes was that of her nurse; Dorothy, kind and capable Dorothy McGuire. Her past good fortune had deserted her and now, she is homeless, and hungry and angry. A wise old woman of the streets, Kitty Old Bull, tucked Dorothy under her wing and taught her the ways of her world. But the streets are often violent, and one day it was Dorothy's turn to care for Kitty.Meanwhile, Brad Parker receives an offer for his company. However, Eleanor is his major stockholder and he can't sell without her signature. And so he hires Juanita Martinez, one of the most expensive private eyes in NYC. His story, told unemotionally about his wife's disappearance was more lies than truth, is something he excels at. At the same time Juanita's priority is hunting terrorists. As a former NYC cop, she helped pull her former comrades from under the Twin Towers. Since then she has been single-minded in her pursuit terrorists.But something about Brad's story rang false. Eleanor had been gone too long. The trail is cold, or is it?