David Diamantes

DEAD PEN PALS
Neil Hartley has it all. He’s rich, politically connected and powerful. He’s married to a former Miss North Carolina first runner-up. She’s addicted to prescription pain medication and the Home Shopping Network. He finds romance online when he meets Karin in an internet chat room. She’s thirty, beautiful and in a bad marriage too. Only Karin isn’t her real name. And she’s not thirty, beautiful, married, or even a woman. Karin is really a twenty-eight year old, morbidly obese internet conman named Duncan Weller, who blackmails his online victims. When Weller is brutally murdered, the police find Hartley’s emails in Weller’s computer.

Darnell Harris is a cab driver with issues. He walks, talks and looks like a Marine. But his high and tight haircut and Death Before Dishonor tattoo camouflage a secret past. He was thrown out of the Marine Corps during his first week of boot camp. When Harris almost kills a homeless panhandler with a single punch, community activists and elected officials want him prosecuted for a hate crime. Darnell Harris was also one of Duncan Weller’s customers, and even had the same cyber-girlfriend as Neil Hartley.

The Reverend Anthony Armstrong Jeter has turned the Mayor and police chief into his personal puppets. The press can’t get enough of his protests against the city’s treatment of the homeless. He wants Darnell Harris charged with a hate crime. The mayor and chief of police want it too, but only if it will make Reverend Jeter go away. Darnell Harris isn’t happy about Jeter or the protests. He takes the pistol that his father used to commit suicide and decides to pay Reverend Jeter a visit.

Detective Bugs Cameron tries to keep a low profile in the neighborhood. His backyard apiary is tucked between a six-foot privacy fence and his shed. Two days after his bees swarm and terrorize his next-door neighbors, a local television reporter knocks on his door asking about the bees. As he struggles for words, she tells him that she has just been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. She’s been reading about apitherapy. She wants to be stung. And she wants Bugs Cameron to do it. As Cameron juggles the investigation where Hartley, Harris, Jeter and Weller seem to collide at every lead, bee venom isn’t the only chemistry that develops between him and the reporter.