All Brad Powers wanted was second career as a small-town cop. But even though he’s denied the job, he solves the community’s 20-year-old murder mystery anyway.
Soon after the police chief rejects his work application, Powers – a retired Army investigator -- begins a slow inadvertent stumble into the intertwined lives of two women: Carlene, a murderous predator, and Myra, her prey.
Powers defeats an attack upon Myra, an event triggering not only his investigative instincts, but also a new murder plus an attempt upon his own life. Slowly he and a detective buddy peel away layers of relationships revealing insatiable greed, conspiracy, corruption, fraud, theft, fraud and the unsolved murder of Myra’s father.
Brad Powers, a retired Army Counterintelligence agent, is just minding his own business working in his late wife’s garden when he breaks up an attempt to mug an attractive women friend named Myra.
Powers, a retired Army investigator, is convinced the mugging actually was a kidnap attempt. His suspicious sharpen when Myra’s jailed assailant makes bail and somebody bashes in the base of his skull with a baseball bat, exactly the way Myra’s father was murdered 20 years earlier.
Powers and a police detective buddy begin an unofficial investigative partnership, Daniels running interference with the increasingly hostile chief.
Powers is surprised to learn Myra is wealthy and even more surprised to stumble upon some tangled relationships. Myra’s husband, Herb, manages the industrial firm which Myra’s late father rescued years before. The father’s murder occurred after he wed his own teenage secretary, Carlene, a seductress with whom Myra’s hubby now is in a permanent tryst.
As Powers and Daniels pluck at the mystery’s disjointed strands, they discover Carlene and Myra’s husband go way back to the housing projects of Philadelphia. Then a bewildered Myra tells Powers that her endowment trust seems to have far less money than it ought.
Powers and Daniels suspect Herb Windom, the husband and trustee, is looting Myra’s trust. Then an attempt is made on Powers’ life and he is hospitalized. Myra’s husband visits and tries to threaten him. Powers browbeats him into a retreat. The investigators now think Carlene is the brains and motive power behind a murderous conspiracy. Buttressing that theory is the knowledge that Carlene hoards expensive art. Then they discover Windom and Carlene have stolen all but a fraction of Myra’s trust.
