A missing husband. A body in a trunk. And a PI whose filing cabinet contains bourbon, crackers, and a gun he fired once — at a possum.
Los Angeles, 1978. A woman walks into Doc’s office above a Vietnamese restaurant on Fairfax Avenue. Her husband owns a gym on Hyperion. He’s been gone four days. The police said wait. She’s done waiting.
Doc finds him. In the trunk of a Cadillac behind the gym.
Frank Novak is not having an affair. Frank Novak is dead.
The gym has a Development Commission sticker on the door. The Commission controls which projects get built and which neighborhoods get bulldozed. Someone wanted Frank’s property. Frank said no. Now Frank is in a trunk and the Commission’s fingerprints are on the case.
Doc is a PI who used to be a journalist — fired for investigating the same Commission that just produced a body. His car is a ‘72 Firebird that starts on the second try. His landlord is Mrs. Phan, who runs the restaurant downstairs and knows everything about everyone on Fairfax Avenue. His attorney is seventy-three and drinks bourbon at 10 AM. His police contact is the best interrogator in LAPD Homicide.
The case should be simple. Find who killed Frank. But the Commission doesn’t do simple — the Commission does clean.
Handle It Clean is the first book in The Doc Mysteries — a series set in 1970s Los Angeles about a wisecracking PI, a prosecutor who grabs his tie in courthouse hallways, a Vietnamese restaurant owner who weaponizes silence, and a city built on paper and corruption.
Some guys solve cases. Doc just asks questions until somebody confesses.
