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Ralph Ashton gets more than he bargained for when police question him about the death of his ex-boyfriend Elijah Ray, whose body is discovered at the edge of the Saranac River.
When the local police visit Ralph and ask him about a critical piece of case evidence, Ralph becomes a prime suspect. He sets out to learn what happened to Eli the night he left his apartment and is startled to learn about his former boyfriend’s shady past.
As Ralph pursues a dangerous investigation, he discovers things about Eli he did not know while they were together.
Ralph’s life starts to unravel when he loses more people close to him as his mother lies in a hospital bed dying of cancer. Is learning about the truth of Eli’s death worth jeopardizing his safety?
Enjoy an Excerpt
The Saranac River empties into the mouth of Lake Champlain and a sliver of late-evening sun shimmies and slices across shavings of broken ice like a school of shiny fish.
I straighten the blue-and-white striped silk tie my last boyfriend gifted me and stare out at the early November landscape. The ground is dusted with newly fallen snow, and the river, a swollen malignant serpentine of icy water, snakes through a vista of evergreens and sycamores.
I catch my hard stare in the reflection of the large picture window of my therapist’s office.
Dr. James Matheson, basketball tall with peacock-blue eyes and warm brown skin, dressed in a rosy-pink dress shirt and charcoal-gray suit, coaxes me back to the present. His voice is butter soft and attractive, musically inclined and bilingual. Spanish on his mother’s side, I think.
My thoughts unravel like vines on a branch, disoriented, a broken fuse box with faulty wiring. I blow out a loud breath and turn to the long-legged and handsome therapist, my hands packed in the pockets of my khakis so he won’t see them shake. Men make me nervous and weak-kneed.
Dr. Matheson is patient and smiling, waiting for me to speak, to say something, since I’ve been standing in silence for the last fifteen minutes, staring out at the dismal day passing by.
I think about my mother who lies in the hospital dying. I’ve just come from visiting her, before my scheduled therapy session. Dr. Matheson wants to discuss it, from his stone silence and sensitive stares.
I glance at my wristwatch. I’ve been in Pretty Boy’s office for almost an hour, and I haven’t said much or given the good old doc enough to judge or dislike me or cancel my next session. I am surprised he has not asked me not to come back. Maybe he’ll call County Hospital and admit me to the psych ward on the fourth floor if I open my mouth and let him into my dark, sad life.
He does not reach for the phone. He sits poised in the high brown leather chair behind his polished cherry wood desk, with many medical certifications on the wall behind him.
He stares across the room at me, grins, keeping a professional manner, waiting for me to give him his money and time’s worth.
I drag myself toward the overstuffed leather chair across from his desk and collapse into it, as if it is my home base.
About the Author 
Thomas Grant Bruso knew he wanted to be a writer at an early age. He has been a voracious reader of genre fiction since childhood.
His literary inspirations are Ray Bradbury, Dean Koontz, Stephen King, Jim Grimsley, Karin Fossum, and Joyce Carol Oates.
Bruso loves animals, reading books, and writing fiction, and prefers Sudoku to crossword puzzles.
In another life, he was a freelance writer and wrote for magazines and newspapers. In college, he won the Hermon H. Doh Sonnet Competition. Now, he writes and publishes fiction and reviews books for his hometown newspaper, The Press-Republican.
He lives in upstate New York.
Buy the book at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Nine Star Press.
Five years ago, Jack Ballinger was a police officer.
