Pearl in the Diamond World

By Frank Morris

Crime Fiction I Paperback

Ted Dwinnels, private eye, functional alcoholic, beaten-up boxer, and the only man who can stop the rot.

Pulpy noir meets contemporary hip-hop vernacular in this detective thriller. Ted Dwinnels is a Bronx private detective who moonlights as a professional boxer - a thirty-seven-year-old bachelor with a 'situational addiction to alcohol' and few scruples, but an unlikely hero in an urban milieu where he is one of the few traditional stand-up guys. When Barry Budacassista, proprietor of a South Bronx fish market, hires Dwinnels to investigate suspicious late-night activity, the PI finds himself immersed in a web of corruption reaching into city government and the state senate. Despite being beaten, shot and arrested, Dwinnels is drawn ever deeper into a toxic mix of money, drugs and power.

Frank Morris teaches writing and oral communications at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. His previous works include Ride of the Silver Rank, winner of the Palooka Press Chapbook Award for a work of fiction. Frank has lectured around New England on sports history and has interests in Herman Melville, Van Halen, and the 1976 Oakland Raiders.