Whipping Boy: A suspense thriller romance

Murder hits close to home for criminalist Lark Riordan when a neighbor’s son is killed and another neighbor is arrested for the crime. Teaming up with homicide detective Max Siwek to investigate the case, Lark encounters family secrets, old grudges, and dysfunctional relationships that make her own life seem normal. And that’s saying something because her father is a self-involved actor who’s just been nominated for an Oscar, and she and Max have a thing for each other even though he’s her stepbrother. It’s… complicated.

Whipping Boy is a noir-cozy (#NOZY) novella, the first in a new romantic suspense/mystery series with the second book, A TASTE FOR STRANGE, coming soon..

NOVELLA length: 43,000 words, making it a "quick read" but also delivering an entire story.

Whipping Boy: A slang term derived from the old practice of punishing a peasant when a royal misbehaved. In modern usage it means a scapegoat or a victim blamed for something not his fault.

I was working the night Jimmy Morrissey died.
I had been called out to an industrial park in Panorama City at seven o’clock, and three hours later, I was still processing the scene while the nineteen-year-old rent-a-cop who’d called 911 chain-smoked Marlboro Lights and tried not to puke on his already vomit-stained uniform. He’d told his story at least twice since I’d been there, and he was now telling it for a third time to the bored redheaded cop everyone called “Bozo” behind his back. Bozo’s job was to keep civilians away from the crime scene, but the industrial park had been pretty deserted by the time I arrived. The only people whose cars were still in the lot were a couple of kids who were working on a start-up that had outgrown their studio apartment.
They had bounced around the perimeter earlier, jacked up on energy drinks and curiosity, but there really wasn’t that much to see, so they’d eventually retreated to their office and
returned to their regularly scheduled lives.
As the security guard droned on, I tried to tune him out, but he and Bozo were standing right outside the dumpster where I was working, and he had one of those voices—high and nasally—that was just the right frequency to cut through the white noise, so I couldn’t help hearing him as he once again recounted the sequence of events leading up to this horror show.
He’d been making his hourly circuit when he heard what he described as a “weird noise” coming from one of the huge dumpsters wedged into a remote corner of the employees’ parking
lot.
When he investigated the source of the sound, he’d found a colony of rats feasting on the remains of two, possibly three, small children. We weren’t sure yet.
.
Freaked out, the guard had pulled the weapon he was licensed to carry after passing the test required to earn a Handgun Safety Certificate, and emptied the whole clip into the depths of the dumpster, killing two rats and further mutilating the tiny bodies he’d found.
It’s a miracle he wasn’t killed by a ricochet.
*
The two detectives who’d caught the case, Vernon and Malouf, were solid guys. LAPD’s Counter Terrorism and Special Operations Bureau kept cruising Malouf because he spoke Arabic and had worked undercover, and they were just itching to send him nosing around some group they suspected of plotting bad things. He always told them “no thanks,” even when they tried to guilt-trip him. He had a wife and two small children and a sickly mother-in-law to look out for, and he wasn’t willing to put them at risk.
He and Vernon had been partners for a couple of years now, and despite being as different as possible in personality, their investigative styles meshed seamlessly. They had the best clearance rate in the department. Both of them liked to talk, and they always seemed to be engaged in one long conversation that continuously looped back to several topics, including
Vernon’s impending retirement.