#Excerpt from NIGHTFALL by Brian White #Crime #Mystery #GoodReads

Middleton is a relic. I suppose you could call it a West Coast version of Detroit. During the industrial age Middleton (then Middle-Town – the brainchild of some uncreative founding sap) thrived as a rapidly growing Californian Mecca for blue-collar job seekers. Families arrived in droves during the post-World War decades. Middle-Town upgraded to Middleton. Life was good.

Then industry became a thing of the past. No one cared about cars or manufacturing. Computers were the new thing in town, and no one in Middleton knew shit about them.

Factories closed, manufacturing lines ground to a halt. Banks worked overtime serving foreclosure notices.

Like Detroit, you can’t come close to calling Middleton a ghost town. What you can call it is a wasted husk of its former self.

Every once in a while you’ll catch a documentary on TV about it. The narrator remarks for a time on the tragedy – the jobs lost, the poverty, the shame of a once-proud populace – before moving on to brighter times in another part of the country. Usually complete with soft, light-hearted background music toward the end.

The weather here seems to compliment the rest of the town’s atmosphere; perpetual gray from an overcast sky, cool temperatures, and frequent fog banks all contribute to the Melancholy which seems to pervade everywhere. You’ll usually catch a glimpse of the sun during dawn and dusk. Any time other than that and you’re lucky.

Life goes on in here, like it does anywhere else in the world. C’est la Vie and all that.

My office is a rented space in one of the smaller abandoned factories located on the east side of town. Someone with a little money tried to renovate it and draw in some executive types, but that failed like most business ventures here do.

It made for a cheap place to rent, though and for someone like me cheap is a selling point.

And it was in this office where Amanda Wells visited me for the first and only time. It’s funny in a cruel sort of way. I mean, don’t stories like this always start with a dame?

A beautiful young escort is strangled to death, her corpse discarded in a back alley dumpster. The killer’s identity is a mystery, and the homicide has gone almost unnoticed. Welcome to Middleton, where these things happen every night and the police are too busy or too jaded to notice.

Ezzy Morgan once roamed these blue collar streets as a paramedic. Here she was weaned from innocence and taught the cold-blooded nature of the human heart. Now she works as a private detective and has shut the door on shootings, stabbings, and the constant specter of death. But her life is about to be shattered when the dead woman’s only surviving friend seeks her out, looking for justice.

Clues are sparse and the trail seems to be a dead end before it has even begun. But the mystery takes a macabre turn after another death is dropped at Ezzy’s feet, and she’s hit with an ultimatum from the world of organized crime: find the killer in the next twenty-four hours . . . or die.

This murder mystery turned terrifying struggle between life and death will expose a cover-up spanning two generations involving a sadistic psychopath, a burned-out cop with a cocaine habit, and a powerful man willing to commit murder just to ensure a secret stays buried.

With the noose tightening and the clock winding down to her own demise, Ezzy must come to terms with a darkness she thought she’d left behind years ago. Nightfall has come to Middleton, and she might not live to see the dawn.

Brian White has crafted a captivating tale in the new noir. Nightfall, with its crisp prose and razor-sharp dialogue, is a thrilling tale of crime and suspense that grips you by the throat and doesn’t let go until the end.

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Genre - Crime, Noir, Mystery

Rating – R

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