The Dead Man Lying blog tour
#LeiCrimeKW — new titles in June!
Josh Fong looked at her through narrowed eyes for a moment, then unzipped his jacket and pulled out a satchel. He reached inside and pulled out the biggest revolver Vanessa had ever seen. Her heart pounded. There was no time to reach her trusty Walther before he could turn that massive weapon toward her. But he put it carefully on the kitchen table. It was an antique weapon — that was clear from the curved shaped of the wooden grip and the fancy engraving on the cylinder.Where other revolvers had an ejector rod under the barrel was a tube, bigger around than the barrel itself. And there was a strange external rod on a clip alongside the barrel. The bottom of the grip had an eye, as if it were meant to be hung on a nail. “Where did you find this?” she asked.
“In the tool shed under Kaholo Iolani’s apartment,” he answered. Lei came into the kitchen then.
“Josh Fong,” she said. “I could arrest you for interfering with an investigation.”
“I wish you hadn’t touched this, Josh,” Vanessa said. “But if it’s Kaholo’s gun, he may have every right to own it.”
Lei came to the table like the revolver was pulling her. Her eyes were locked on the weapon. “Wow. That is one old gun.”
“I know. Josh found it in Kaholo’s tool shed. I’ve never seen anything like it before.” Lei pulled on latex gloves and picked up the gun.
“This is very unusual. It has two barrels, one under the other.” She held it so Vanessa could get a closer look.
“The hammer is strange, too. It has a little tab in the middle,” Vanessa said. “It’s not loaded — you can see into the chambers from the front. And it’s been recently cleaned. I’ll get this to the lab. Maybe someone there can identify this gun.”
“It looks to me like it’s from the Civil War days,” someone said.
Lei and Vanessa turned to see Officer Corinne O’Flynn behind them, looking at the gun. “The cylinder is round, without those indentations between the chambers? They’re called ‘flutes.’ But older guns didn’t have those. And see, it’s made to be front-loaded.” O’Flynn pointed at the open chambers, facing forward in the gun. “This was made before bullet cartridges. You had to pour powder into the chamber and hold it in place with wadding. Look — it has nine chambers. Probably because it took so long to load, you wanted to have as many shots as possible on the battlefield. It must weigh a ton.”
Lei and Vanessa just looked at the uniformed woman. With her slender face, large, earnest eyes and bobbed chestnut hair, she looked more like a schoolteacher than a cop. Yet here she was, holding forth on an obscure, antique gun.
About Dead Man Lying
She knows when you’re lying …FBI Special Agent Vanessa Storm is back on Maui to catch a killer. With lush rain forests, black sand beaches, and a laid-back lifestyle, Maui offers the perfect retirement location for once-famous country singer Steven Sangster … until he ends up dead. As the killer, or killers, strike again and again, Detective Lei Texeira and FBI Special Agent Vanessa Storm must untangle the lies spun by the singer’s associates, friends, family — and the singer himself before the music dies. Find it on Amazon.About Amazon Kindle Worlds
Kindle Worlds is an Amazon initiative that allows authors to publish stories set in another author’s fictional universe. The Lei Crime Kindle World is based on the Lei Crime series, created by bestselling author Toby Neal.About the author
- epic fantasy in Initiation Rites and The Bones of the Earth
- erotic-romantic parody in One Shade of Red
- historical memoir in Army of Worn Soles and its sequel, Under the Nazi Heel
- mysteries with
- Torn Roots (A Lei Crime Kindle World Mystery)
- JET: Stealth (A JET Kindle World novella)
- Palm Trees & Snowflakes (A Lei Crime Kindle World Mystery)
- The Wife Line (A Sydney Rye Kindle World adventure)
- And now his latest Lei Crime mystery, Dead Man Lying.
- his website The Written Word
- his blog, Written Words
- And follow him on Twitter @ScottTheWriter.
