Dick Darrell, the Artist Detective

A murdered man. A daughter left alone. And the one artist in New York who refuses to look away.

Dick Darrell has spent years turning detective work into a hobby—a gentleman's indulgence between brushstrokes and studio evenings. He is clever, well-liked, and comfortable. Then he stumbles over a body in a darkened hallway, and comfort becomes a luxury he can no longer afford.

The dead man is Albert Lingardi, his neighbor and friend. The grieving daughter upstairs is Madeleine—a woman Dick admires more than he has ever admitted aloud. The police are already lost. And before the night is an hour old, a menacing stranger has punched Dick to the floor and vanished into the New York winter with a single warning: stay out of it.

Dick does not stay out of it.

As he digs into Lingardi's secretive past—the travels that always avoided Italy, the cryptic letters, the unwelcome visitors—he finds threads that reach further and darker than any single act of violence. Someone powerful does not want the truth discovered. Someone is willing to kill again to keep it buried.

And Madeleine, still shattered, still sleeping under a physician's opiate, carries secrets of her own she does not yet know she holds.

Dick is brave, relentless, and certain he can see what others cannot.

But can he unravel the strange mystery of the studio before the killer decides an artist detective is too dangerous to leave alive?