Desolation Alley

An alarming percentage of American middle class wage earners live out their working lives in debt, one paycheck away from living out of a dumpster. An alarming percentage of American landlords are more properly slumlords, expert in skirting local ordinances and law enforcement. An alarming percentage of municipal code enforcement offices are too understaffed and under-budgeted to enforce the writs they are daily called upon to serve. An alarming percentage of middle class Americans lead lives of what Thoreau called quiet, and sometimes not so quiet, desperation. For some of them, "quiet desperation" can lead to bloody murder. An alarming percentage of homicide files go cold-case every year without ever being solved and closed by law enforcement. All too often, there are simply insuperable limits on what law enforcement can accomplish. Unless... Unless you're a town like Woodruff New York, where there dwells an upright citizen who knows how to work the shady side of the street when necessary, Private Eye Geoffrey Knight, considered by many to be the greatest Consulting Detective since Sherlock Holmes. Do take an hour or so to tag along with Knight and his assistants down "Desolation Alley" into the dark side of domestic real estate, human tragedy and bloody murder, deducing step by step with them in a fair-play murder mystery which has, for the moment, got local law enforcement stumped. Besides being a compelling murder mystery, "Desolation Alley," at 87 pages the first novella of Garman Lord's "Commando Chronicles" series, has its share of chuckles, heartwarming moments and deeper human truths along the way.