Detective in trench coat huddled in foreground with sailing ship deep in fog behind him

Detective Frank McCord and The Foghorn Blues

"Detective Frank McCord and the Foghorn Blues" by W. Lawrence Nash is a thrilling multi-layered detective novel which will keep you guessing to the last page.
Frank is thrust into a mind-bending paradox when he is engaged by a client who exists impossibly in today’s world, to find a missing person from centuries past. He is drawn into a tangle of time loops to the long-gone era of the great sailing ships. Sleepless nights are filled with a nightmarish alternate reality as each night he awakes clawing at his throat for air, drenched in sweat and suffocating from a stranglehold of terror. Every blazing red eye, and every putrid swirl of the green slime maelstrom repeats and repeats, yet each time it terrifies him anew as he falls into what he hopes to be sleep, but never is. His hours of blackness are filled with the same cry for help and Paula is still dead, and nothing can change that, and every day, a long defunct foghorn calls him to the sea and to the concrete jetty where Paula's shoe was found. He follows the wrong trails, trusts the wrong people, loves the wrong woman, and drives himself headlong into a calamitous conclusion which traps him from every direction. Filled with nail-biting suspense and heart-pounding action, this book is a must-read for fans of crime fiction and detective stories.

EXCERPT

Leander Vang drew softly and contentedly on the last bit of his dream stick and held onto the sweetness with his eyes closed, waiting for the next plateau. His opium lamp had heated his blue and white porcelain pipe bowl to the perfect temperature and he rolled the smoke around in his mouth. Decades of use had taught him the perfect timing to avoid the muscle tearing coughs that came if you were slow on the exhale. The tar was sweet and smooth and creamy, and the hoped-for kaleidoscope had started in his head. Jade dragons morphed into flying sampans that became stock exchanges that lived in a cave as a shard of the sun plucked him out to take a ride around the curvature of his mistress' hip. The opium was from Thailand and these days it was the best. Vang removed the bowl from the silver saddle and scoured it with his knife and wiped off the ash on his pantleg. He placed the paraphernalia back on the shallow tray and slid it in under his computer desk and locked it. Today he was trading, and he knew he was smarter with the charts after a small pipe.
He flipped down his blue block lenses to protect against the glare from his computer monitors. Around him, his electronic armamentarium was in full swing. His voice modulator was activated, his VPN told the world he had accessed the internet from Georgetown Guyana, and a radar arm spun its beam from the mast above deck, on the lookout for anything threatening his junk. Beside him, a loose-leaf binder held his stock portfolio and he waited for the opening of the New York exchange. These days too, cryptocurrency had his attention. Its exchanges were always open, and regulation was non-existent. Everything done on trust. Children of the blockchain. Proof of stake, proof of work. Proof of proof. Tangles and nodes and billions just spinning in the ether waiting to be plucked. Like pigeons. Hah.
Sludge from the Pearl River Estuary worked its way through a thousand boats moored around Macau Bay and painted them green with bubbling green froth. Stifling vapor rose and infiltrated the cabin of every vessel, leaving a thin oily film on every surface. It perfused the cabin of Vang's junk with the reek of untreated effluent and mixed itself with opium smoke and gasoline smells from jerry cans. Leander Vang's private phone line rang as the four-hour stock chart of Porphyry Minerals popped up on the New York stock exchange screen. Toothpick Vang watched candles forming on the chart and activated his phone when the scalar whine diminished.