Vincent H. O’Neil
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WorksExile Trust
The Exile town bank is in trouble, and Chief Dannon asks for Frank’s help. The bank has lost track of some of its safe deposit customers, and Frank has to contact the missing box-holders before auditors shut the bank down. Frank quickly discovers that outdated records are just the tip of the iceberg. First, an impostor posing as the husband of a vacationing box-holder tricks his way into the safe deposit area. Then Frank learns that the box’s owner, Dorothea Freehoffer, died in a household accident just a few days earlier—and that her “husband” is long dead. Next, a DA from Tallahassee kicks Frank off the job, and a strange lawyer starts asking questions in Dorothea’s neighborhood. One of the dead woman’s friends gives Frank an envelope she’d been holding for Dorothea, but it contains only one item: A twenty year-old map of a land development scheme that never happened. The questions all start to pile up. What was so important about a bogus map that someone might have committed murder over it? Who was the impostor in the safe deposit area? Why did the chief of police pick an amateur investigator to help out in the first place? In no time at all Frank Cole is knee-deep in land fraud, identity theft, and an accident that looks an awful lot like murder. Par for the course, when living in Exile. American Library Association review of Reduced Circumstances (May 15, 2007)Once upon a time, Frank Cole was the happily married owner of a thriving software firm. But when business and marriage both went under, he landed in the Florida panhandle town of Exile, cobbling together a living as a fact-checker for lawyers and a dispatcher for the Midnight Taxi Service. One night a driver picks up a fare from a local fleabag motel just before the cops bust a salesman with a truck full of dope. Frank puts his own detective skills to work and learns that the fare was a petty con man whose parents were sophisticated financial swindlers. Soon Frank is sucked into the vortex of a case in which his own life may be at risk. The second Frank Cole mystery builds on the series' critically acclaimed debut, Murder in Exile (2006), with a credible plot, a sympathetic protagonist, and an array of eccentric secondary characters. This has the earmarks of a series that could be around a long time; better get in on the fun at the beginning. --Wes Lukowsky Reduced Circumstances
The sequel to the award-winning Murder in Exile starts out in high gear: Fact-checker Frank Cole is moonlighting as the evening dispatcher for the Midnight Taxi Service. It is a quiet Spring Break in the Florida panhandle until a nervous teenaged boy flags down a Midnight cab near a parking lot full of flashing police lights. The next evening, suspicious strangers start appearing at the taxi stand, asking Frank about the boy and where he was headed. The ride speeds up after that. The driver who took the fare runs off, the teenager is revealed as a man with a past, his beautiful blonde girlfriend joins the chase, and a dead body turns up holding a Midnight Taxi Service roadmap. Once again, Frank Cole has to answer questions about a dead guy he never even met in life. The Sunday New York Times Book Review of Murder in Exile (May 21, 2006)The fully dimensional world of a long-running series is harder to find in a first mystery. There's nothing tentative, though, about Vincent H. O'Neil's debut novel, MURDER IN EXILE (Thomas Dunne Books/ Murder in Exile
Winner of the 2005 Malice Domestic Award, Murder in Exile features the character Frank Cole, a recently bankrupted software designer trying to start his life over. Working as a fact checker for local insurance companies, Frank finds that even a simple hit-and-run investigation might not be what it seems. |
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