I’ve got my cup of coffee and am ready to go for the Book Brew!  Happy to share the news that the second Nick Sibelius novel is out today and available at most digital booksellers.  TOXIC RELATIONSHIP was Nick’s first outing as a PI in Austin, Texas. DIRTY WATER is his next challenging case, which starts small and as seems to be the case for Nick, just gets crazier with each turn of the page. Heres’ a blurb:

An open and shut case of vandalism leaves more questions than answers for PI Nick Sibelius, as he untangles a knot of egomania, desire and greed. When entrepreneur Dan Hoyt makes a deal with virtual gaming icon, Izzy Zydeco, to partner in a desalination project Hoyt begins to count his money. Unknown to Hoyt, his partner has bigger and more insidious plans, which involves betraying a major drug cartel and, in a twisted business strategy to build a customer base for desalinated water, contaminating the Austin water supply for the next century. Working with a covert Homeland Security agent and past love, MaryLou and his new partner, Theresa, Nick must thwart Izzy and ultimately choose between justice and saving Theresa’s life. Water is up for grabs in Texas and Nick discovers that H2O is a dirty business.

Excerpt:

In hindsight, Nick would wish he had stayed in bed, dreaming about a naked woman sitting on a camel in a snowstorm. Instead, he sat on a lawn chair in front of his silver bullet shaped Airstream trailer east of Pflugerville, a cup of coffee in one hand, a breakfast taco in the other, watching the sky gradually turn from a deep violet to orange and then a deep blue. Water restrictions left the grass surrounding his trailer, once a lush green blanket of St. Augustine, a crispy brown shag carpet. The turf crackled underfoot and bone dry soil split open crevasses like hundreds of little mouths agape begging for water.

This excuse for a lawn mimicked the sorry state of his life. After finding his anesthesiologist wife astride a trauma doc on her lunch break, Nick’s life had taken a decidedly downward spiral, culminating in being fired from the Houston Police, punctuated with the rim shot of a nasty divorce. Then he fell in love, or maybe lust, with the sister of a murderer, which did not put him in a positive relationship with the local police department. To his horror she drove like a banshee into a raging forest fire, the locals pronouncing her dead. He thought he’d lost her too, until an anonymous email hinted at her survival. Alive or dead, he hadn’t heard from her since the fire over a year ago. A year is a long time to hold onto a faint hope. Now he sat in front of his trailer just outside of the same little town staring at the sorry state of his lawn and contemplating the equally sad state of his life.

Nick looked to a cloudless morning sky predicting the continued demise of his grass. He wondered if he’d be able to find the water which would bring him back to life before he completely dried up and blew away.

When his cell phone rang from the trailer, he poured dregs of his coffee onto the parched earth and stepped inside to take the call.

“Nick Sibelius.”

“Nick, man I’m glad you picked up this early.” Charlie Samuels. The mechanic who kept his pick-up moving in a forward direction. Why is Charlie calling me at 6:30 in the morning? Does Ford have a major recall for spontaneously combustive trucks?

“Charlie?”

“Uh, morning Nick. So sorry to bother you this early.”

“Everything okay? Do I have a critical piece missing from my truck or something?”

“No, no. I’m not calling about your truck. I just remembered the last conversation we had.”

“Yeah, my clutch would probably be good for another twenty thousand miles.”

“No, I mean the part about your business. Private investigations. You are in the private investigation business, right?”

“Yeah, that’s what I do.”

Nick’s business plan demanded a swank address among the hills and million dollar homes of west Austin. His bank account, however, forced him to settle for a decomposing northeast Austin industrial park built in the early 70’s on a plot of land contaminated by two decades of toxic waste dumping. The new business bled cash as soon as he set up an office. Fortunately, Alice, his assistant, had agreed to come back to work for him part time after he let the business slide over losing the aforementioned girl. Unfortunately, he had used most of his savings since leaving the police force in Houston and his few small investigation gigs. If he didn’t get a client in the next week he’d need to start checking out cafe barista jobs and put the Airstream up for sale.

“I’m sure you’re swamped with work, Nick, but I’ve got a client for you. Between you and me, he’s a bit of an ass, but I bet he’ll pay pretty well.”

Nick decided to leave Charlie with the assumption he had clients falling all over themselves to use his services, especially after the word “pay” caught his attention.

“I might be interested. How do you know he’ll pay well for the work?”

“I work on his Ferrari. Brand new. He won’t trust it to the dealer, only to his personal mechanic.”

“And that’s you.”

“Afraid so. Like I said, he’s a bit of a pain, but I’ve made a pretty good living off of him. He drives a lot of high end stuff, so other than dealing with him, it’s fun for me and I can charge premium prices.”

“Do you know what this is about?”

“Tell you what. Can you be at 2002 Island Palms Cove in an hour? It’s over by Mount Bonnell.”

“That’s the other side of town, Charlie. Don’t know with the traffic, but I can give it a shot. So, you going to tell me what this is about?”

“Not sure myself. Something about his Ferrari being destroyed. Hell, I’d drive across town just to see what that looks like.”

“Okay. Tell your guy, what’s his name?”

“Hoyt. Dan Hoyt.”

Nick had heard of this guy. Besides being a Texas tabloid playboy and a douche bag, he had made his fortune in commercial real estate before the age of thirty. Lately he had been on a bit of a losing streak. He started a controversial gated community for adults under fifty-five without children “” kind of a little suburban City of Sin”” which kept his lawyers continuously busy. In the middle of multiple lawsuits, he built a towering condo in downtown Austin with so many engineering issues the City Council finally had the building pulled down. Then Nick thought he had read something about the guy buying up land on the Gulf Coast in the last couple of years. The speculation around his most recent activity ranged from a massive beachfront condo to an oil refinery.

“The commercial real estate Dan Hoyt?”

“That’s the one. I’ll meet you there.” Nick shoved the phone into his pocket.

Well Nick, I guess it’s time to dance with the devil.