Albatross

Two nuns murdered. Two elderly, wonderful women brutally stabbed to death outside their ghetto mission as they went into the streets to gather the addicts and human waste for a night’s rest. Motive? None. If scum are willing to come out of the shadows just to kill, they get paid in little more than blood. In this neighborhood, blood is gold.



Private detective Richard Dean Buckner aids his best friend and former homicide partner Graham Clevenger in working the case. The local priest sees Buckner’s handiwork—and rage—firsthand and hires him with the intention of hopefully saving the killer from the worst of the bare knuckle detective’s rampage.



Buckner develops a lead and hunts the suspect down, but as Clevenger develops a second, less likely and more earth-shattering suspect of his own, friend is pitted against friend as they race to prove who really did it. All the while Buckner is trying to ignore a similar case from his past where he allowed his pride to railroad the suspect into an early grave. Fearing Clevenger is about to do the same thing, Buckner realizes just how bleak his mistake was.



To hunt a man who slaughtered two nuns, Buckner needs to use a junkyard dog as a landing cushion, make a victim remember the worst night of her life and undo years of therapy, smoke PCP and use a barnyard blow-up doll to strangle a man. So be it. Just another day.



Praise for ALBATROSS:



“The only thing more satisfying than watching a series character evolve is witnessing your favorite author make that same transformation. Blessedly, Albatross exhibits both those traits. Richard Dean Buckner, Ryan Sayles’s violent, beleaguered, and damn-near-nihilistic private detective, struggles to accept the ideas of grace and the inherent value of humanity in the wake of callous atrocity. And Sayles dares the reader by writing a novel that’s not just interested in the characters’ lives—their brutal existences—but their immortal souls as well. Somebody is finally doing something interesting with crime fiction.” —Grant Jerkins, author of Abnormal Man



“I have come to realize Richard Dean Buckner as a force of nature. A tool Ryan Sayles uses as deftly as only someone as skilled as he can. All told, Albatross is not only a ride I recommend, but one I admire. A fine addition to RDB series.” —Beau Johnson, author of A Better Kind of Hate