DEAD BODY IN A SMALL ROOM

“A DALLAS NORGOOD MYSTERY”

By Charles Deemer

Synopsis

 

 

 

Brief synopsis:

 

The protagonist is Dallas Norgood, a successful Hollywood screenwriter who narrowly survives a bout with cancer and so is determined to create a less stressful life for himself. To this end, he moves to Sogobia, a small desert town in northern Nevada, where his sister and only family is a cop. Sogobia has legal prostitution.

 

In this first book, Dallas gets involved in the apparent suicide of Brooke, one of the working girls. Her mother insists that the suicide note was not in her daughter's writing, that it was murder. Dallas, who's been thinking of writing a book about brothel culture (book author as a new career), looks into Brooke's death and the more he looks, the more it looks like murder. His investigation takes him into an eastern religious cult in Oregon, where Brooke had spent some time, and into local Basque culture, her former lover (and the father of her aborted baby) being a Basque revolutionary-in-hiding. Then the FBI comes onto the scene with an agenda of its own.

 

Along the way, Dallas moves between his regular hooker at the local brothel and Cheyenne, the woman who has the janitorial service there ("Mop Around the Clock") and in whom he has  romantic interest. The two threads of suspects come together when Cheyenne is taken hostage by Spanish loyalists and offered in exchange for her brother, the Basque revolutionary. Dallas finds himself smack in the middle of a showdown at Butch Cassidy Days, a festival in nearby Winnemucca.

 

But the true circumstances of Brooke's death reveal themselves only after Cheyenne is rescued -- in a twist that Dallas doesn't see coming.