How do you tell a beauty who’s never seen a battlefield about the fear and exhilaration of parachuting into Normandy or being surrounded at Bastogne? How do you discuss over a rare steak what artillery does to human flesh, or the memories that haunt your nights?

“I’ve probably had my fill of camping.”

Jack Griffin is the only working detective at Aadlund and Griffin Investigations. Maybe that’s why he never gets the girl, and always has to put a steak over his eye. Maybe.

Washington in July. The ceiling fans swished the air around like wet laundry. They’d built the dining room on the rooftop, but you couldn’t get above the heat. 

Her dazzle turned my way. “What do you do, Jack?” I told her I was a private detective. She giggled. “You’re not here on a case, are you? Which of us are you investigating?”

“I’ve had my eye on you all evening, lady.”

She snickered. “How do you like being a private eye?” 

“The good part is nobody tells me what to do and I never know what the next day will bring. The bad part is about the same as the good part.” Leave the tedium and the tenuous income out of it. “It doesn’t involve nearly as many desperate, gorgeous women as I’d been led to believe.”

She smiled. “What a shame!” 

Jack Griffin wants the girl, wants her bad, but even that doesn’t persuade him to pin it on his competition for her affections, Jack Kennedy, the young earnest senator that Griffin genuinely likes.

It didn’t occur to me then that Kennedy was rich. All I saw was this skinny, unassuming guy with a New England accent. His suit hung on his bones as though he were still recovering from the South Pacific, but his grin was a Steinway piano. Kennedy had the kind of charm that made you like him even when he was winning the girl you wanted. How do you outmaneuver a romancer like that?

My book, the first in my Griffin series, Let’s Say Jack Kennedy Killed the Girl, releases this summer, from Hawkshaw Press. Follow my blog for more teasers from Kennedy, more info. on Griffin, and me, and a chance to get some exclusive content.

In the meantime, if you need a private dick: