Joey Costa's New Game - Free Kindle Book

Joey Costa's New Game: A Goomba in Paradise
by Henry Simpson

The main characters in this novel are Joe Costa (AKA “Joey Brick”), a mob lawyer, and Sandra Lawler, a gifted Las Vegas police detective with a personal secret. Their separate stories interweave and eventually converge.

After ten years as a mob lawyer, Costa leaves the shady clientele and stress of his Los Angeles law practice for a more sedate life selling real estate in upscale Montecito. He has mixed success at his new game, but his past reputation attracts clients who hire him to solve their thorny problems by means legal and otherwise. Among them are Ken Pell, an art professor who wants out of an illegal contract to forge fine art for a malevolent cocaine distributor. Costa must find a way to do the job without getting himself or his client killed or alerting law enforcement.

Costa’s efforts are complicated by Dan Quick, his reckless former bodyguard. Quick operates a private security firm and employs a man who moonlights wholesaling crystal meth. A meth lab is raided, and soon an organic chemist is murdered in a Las Vegas hotel. Vegas police assign Lawler to solve the crime. She tracks the likely killer to Santa Barbara, identifies Costa and Quick as persons of interest, and must determine whether they colluded with the killer in murder.

Supporting characters include a faded pop music producer, a Mafioso, a gentle but sometimes violent giant, a lurking hit man with a grudge against Costa, a peeping Tom, a shrewd old real estate broker, a paranoid chemist, outlaw bikers, a German Shepherd, and ghosts. Significant elements are murders, romance, tragic love, suicide, an estate once owned by a silent movie star, a red Ducati, a red Camaro, a bottle of absinthe, a Coco Chanel dress, Willie Nelson’s music, real estate practice, architectural history, a skip loader, and visits to exciting locations in Southern California and Nevada.