The Wrong Day to Quit Drinking

When neophyte private eye Salmon Chase witnesses a one car accident on an icy road, he takes home a laptop from the scene that puts him squarely in the crosshairs of a militia with an agenda that they will stop at nothing to implement.
Chase was a NYC FD fire marshal. Alcoholism and PTSD from his near miss escape on 9/11 got him a forced retirement at the age of 42 on a disability. His wife divorced him, took his daughter and disappeared. In Chase’s words, “My life is like a bad Asian massage, all pain, no happy ending.” He is now a private detective in the Catskill mountain region of New York. He runs the business from a Craigslist ad which gets him 3 kinds of potential clients. People who are too poor to pay him; people who are too crazy to work for and people like Paul Klansky, who owns an insurance company and feeds Chase regular but unremarkable cases.
His newest client is different. Rosalind is a 40 something, seductive, unmarried heiress who demands he find her missing brother. Chase finds her beauty intoxicating and her lustful need almost too strong to resist. His life has taken a toll on him and he yearns for a woman in his life. The crash Chase witnessed resulted in three dead bodies, two from the crash and one, bound, with a hole in his head. He discovers that the murder victim was his client’s brother, a sheltered and spoiled dilatant who still lives with his sister in the family mansion. With Horst dead, his chances with Rosalind evaporate, until she prevails upon him to find Horst’s body, when nobody will disclose the location or even the existence of his remains.
This simple search will sprial out into a much bigger plot with international ramifications.