The Tower of Songs

July 1, 2019
Unlicensed and unlicensable investigator Duck Darley goes looking for a missing billionaire and finds endless troubles along the way. Layla Soto is convinced that her father has been kidnapped, and you can see why: A video sent to Nicole Soto, her pill-head mother, shows her father, obviously drugged and sitting in a wheelchair, as he's carted past one of his state-of-the-art apartment building's security cameras by a pair of female ninjas. "Report to no one and there will be no problems," the abductors warn Nicole, so naturally she tells her 17-year-old daughter, and naturally Layla tells Duck, whom she knows she can trust because his ex is the mother of a schoolmate. Readers who can swallow this improbable setup will be invited to swallow more. Shortly after Layla hands Duck a bag containing $60,000 cash to cover his fee and expenses, Richard Gross, the Soto family's security chief, pulls a gun on Duck and threatens to blow him away. Not to be outdone, Duck talks Gross into going around the corner to join him in a cup of coffee and then runs out on him when he high-tails it to the men's room. If he'd stuck around, he would have seen big, strong Gross dying of poison. As it is, Duck makes it as far as a meeting with Cassandra Kimball, the dominatrix he partnered with informally in his last case (Against Nature, 2018), to discuss a more formal business relationship when he's felled by a dose of the same nasty stuff but manages to pull through. Awakening in a hospital bed, he finds a pair of government agents standing over him, warning him to keep far away from a case no one's supposed to know he's taken, for the sake of national security. Less a mystery than an adventure that manages to be both replete with incident and somehow uneventful.

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July 22, 2019
In Barrett’s suspenseful, if heavy-handed, third novel featuring former competitive swimmer turned unlicensed PI Duck Darley (after 2018’s Against Nature), streetwise 17-year-old Layla Soto asks Duck to locate her billionaire father, Danny Soto, whose abduction from their high-rise Manhattan apartment building was caught on surveillance cameras. Duck is ready to dive back into work after a six-week-long alcohol and coke–fueled bender, and the bag of cash that Layla offers is a big motivator, as is the prospect of partnering with his former dominatrix friend, Cass Kimball. Layla thinks that her dad’s mother, Eileen Chung, was involved, and the stakes are made crystal clear when Duck is poisoned and barely pulls through a weeklong coma to find himself hounded by aggressive federal agents. A surprise offer by Eileen changes the game. Duck narrates with a voice right out of classic hardboiled noir, complete with existential ruminations on his self-destructive nature. Though accessible to new readers, this outing will mostly appeal to series fans, particularly those who value the journey over the destination. Agent: Alec Shane, Writers House.