Publisher's Synopsis
From the opening bell of Manuscript found in a Violin. Hugh Turley has his back to the wall. Hoods waylay him in the park, an underhanded Imam threatens to put a fatwah on him, and his old partner from N.Y.P.D. pressures him to intervene in a potentially deadly quarrel. Suddenly, jobs that should be easy get tricky and dangerous. Is someone out to get Turley, and if so, why? Making enemies comes easy to a P.I., but the trouble suddenly coming to Turley is much more than the usual sore-heads who have been exposed as cheaters, or loading-dock chiselers who have been caught in the act. It's as if Turley has suddenly been hexed. One life-threatening cliffhanger of a crisis after another knocks him around like a bearing in a pinball machine, until he is practically punchy.What's going on? Could the adversary simply be the Imam who has fingered Turley as a profaner of Islam? Could it be that the guy recognizes Turley as the kid who once finagled a religious certificate from a mosque in Bed-Sty in order to crash the Haj? Or is he just guessing? Or maybe the threat is payback from a mysterious figure who has recently muscled into the hooker trade. After all, Turley recently saved the sister of a client from a pimp in a sleazy hotel. To complicate matters, the sister offers herself to Turley, who has already fallen for the client herself, a beautiful psychiatrist Turley hasn't a chance in hell with.As more suspects occur to Turley he finds himself dropping the ball time after time. When you're suddenly dealing with murder, extortion, terrorism, shootouts, police procedure, kidnapping and sex on a constant basis any slip-up is dangerous. There's nothing predictable about the series of narrow misses that put Turley's head on the chopping block time after time. He gets into a shootout with a gang of terrorists who've blown up a children's hospital. He's paralyzed on a jet that has a dead pilot at the controls. He's tied to a tree with a shotgun pointed at him and used as a punching bag. He even gets buried alive. It's like manning Captain Nelson's Seaview and having to face the giant shark outside and the zombie inside on the same episode instead of on alternate weeks. Turley has one thing going for him that most others don't though: he can take more punishment than John L. Sullivan's Timex. But just as he is about to get the problem into focus, yet another distraction pops up. Arnold Gassner, an old acquaintance, appears on the scene with a newly-discovered manuscript presumably written by Edgar Allan Poe. It's a short story called "The Albatross," about two shipwrecked sailors in big trouble. Turley has a choice. He can tend to his own potentially fatal problem, or go out of his way to help a friend.Turley helps, but the act of rescuing Poe's authenticating signature turns out to be a trigger for apocalyptic events. The fast-paced action comes to a conclusion in a most unlikely place, a Louisiana swamp. The answer he finds there isn't pretty. As events play out the reader is faced with a second mystery. How good is the author's attempt to create a reasonable facsimile of a work by Edgar Allan Poe? Will he expose it to examination at all, or just ask the reader to take it on faith that Gassner found a Poe story? After all the build-up this is one MacGuffin that better be good. The answer is . . . up to you!
