Rolling Square Dice: A Gambling Detective Novella

His name is Jericho Edge.
His mother, a decent woman, wished to follow the southern custom of giving children biblical names, but she was not well read.
Had she attempted to supply her twin boys with biblical names from memory, they would have attended school as Jesus and Moses. Instead, she randomly opened her complimentary motel Bible—stolen and brought home to give her small house some religion—and read aloud, “And the Lord said unto Joshua, ‘See, I have given unto thy hand Jericho.’”
She thought it sounded nice, important, and with both names beginning with “J,” it would be easy to remember.
“Hell,” Jericho often claims, “it could be worse: if she’d stolen a map instead of a Bible, my brother and I might have been Minneapolis and St. Paul.”
Joshua died in a car wreck on their eighteenth birthday; Jericho walked away from the wreckage unharmed. The cliff they flew over is now called Joshua Falls—a cub reporter’s idea of humor that somehow entered the town’s lexicon.
The crash was a decade and a half ago. Now, Jericho Edge is a private detective who pays slow rent hustling cards and pool while solving the occasional case with his business partner and best friend Sam “The Lion” Smith. With an office located above his uncle’s pool room and an array of customers not known to associate willingly with law enforcement, Jericho tries to maintain his balance on the edge of society between order and chaos.