The Dead Beat Scroll, the latest P.I. novel by Mark Coggins, is illustrated with scene-setting photographs from San Francisco.
These black and white photographs, which mostly feature empty spaces and streets, bring a refreshing perspective to Mr. Coggin’s novel which is centered around the themes of revenge and betrayal.
In The Dead Beat Scroll, private investigator August Riordan returns to San Francisco to avenge the death of his friend and one-time partner, Chris Duckworth.
Duckworth has taken over Riordan’s old business, his old office, and even his old apartment, and Riordan suspects Duckworth’s death is linked to the missing-person case he was working when he died.
Mark Coggins’s work has been nominated for the Shamus and Barry crime fiction awards and selected for best-of-the-year lists compiled by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Description: Lobby of the Flood Building, San FranciscoBook Quote: “I was less than ten paces from the elevator on the twelfth floor of the Flood Building when the door to Duckworth Investigative Solutions opened and Gretchen stepped out.”
Description: Hotel Pickwick, San FranciscoBook Quote: “Take it to the Pickwick on Fifth Street. It’s just across Market about three blocks from your dump. The place was built in the ’20s, and they’ve got a proper locked storage room with shelves.”
Description: Temple Emanu-El, San FranciscoBook Quote: “The Arguello Boulevard address Kim gave me turned out to be just across the street from the monumental Temple Emanu-El. I had a cab drop me a block away, walked to a spot by the entrance to the temple, and stood in the gloom scoping out the property.”
In The Dead Beat Scroll, private investigator August Riordan returns to San Francisco to avenge the death of his friend and one-time partner, Chris Duckworth.
An alluring young woman named Angelina hired Duckworth to look for her half-sister, but what Riordan finds instead is a murderous polyamorous family intent on claiming a previously unknown manuscript from Beat writer Jack Kerouac.
Description: House on Arguello Boulevard, San Francisco Book Quote: “The house was tall, narrow, and vaguely English with a peaked roof, overhanging windows with tiny rectangular panes, and a jutting columnar chimney.”
Description: John’s Grill, San FranciscoBook Quote: “After a lot of grumbling about misuse of city resources, Kittredge dropped me off on Ellis Street at the back of the Flood building. I went in the arched entryway next to John’s Grill and rode up to the twelfth floor.”
Description: Burritt Street, San Francisco (this is also the alley where Miles Archer is murdered in The Maltese Falcon)Book Quote: “I scrambled up the stairs to Bush Street, then hurried west on Bush until I came to the short alley where I’d left Ray’s Dodge Aries facing outward.”
Description: Chair in Mountain View Cemetery Mausoleum, OaklandBook Quote: “Chris was buried in the Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland. Somehow he’d managed to score a family-size crypt in the main mausoleum, which had been sold out for years and was home to the industry titans Henry J. Kaiser and Warren A. Bechtel who had collaborated on construction of the Hoover Dam.”
Following clues from Duckworth and a trail of mutilated bodies left by the family, Riordan soon realizes that avenging his partner will first involve recovering the manuscript—then saving Angelina and himself from kidnap, torture, and death. As the bodies pile up, Riordan must work with old allies and enemies to untangle Duckworth’s last case before time runs out.
*****
Mark Coggins’s work has been nominated for the Shamus and Barry crime fiction awards and selected for best-of-the-year lists compiled by the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Detroit Free Press among others. His novels Runoff and The Big Wake-Up won a Next Generation Indie Book Award and the Independent Publisher Book Award respectively, and his The Immortal Game has been optioned for a film.
*****
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