A serial killer works the New Orleans streets. "The Shrovetide Ripper." Each year, more victims add to the body count.
A new Private Detective emerges. Nicolaus Vagelle. Criminal Psychologist. Former cop with the NOPD, with that one bad case that forces him to throw off the badge, change his name...until he is lured back into the dark work, the bloody work of justice. These days, he bills himself as a Consultant. And his new obsession becomes the fractured psychosis of evil.
Into this bleak framework, a young, unsuspecting, woman arrives. A Russian immigrant with her own shadowed past. She calls herself Alya, "born of the heavens." And she will either learn to fight, or be lost to the eternal night.
"A Study In Darkness: Hades' Kiss" is a collection of short detective works (6 short stories, 3 novelettes, 2 novellas), interconnected as one. A Novel-in-Stories - Thriller / Mystery / Suspense - in a contemporary noir. Case notes chronicling the life of "a knight in dark armor" (to borrow from Philip Marlowe).
Hades' Kiss is the Story of Two.
Two people from different worlds. Intelligent. Noble. Damaged by their pasts. Each recognizing something of themself in the other. In this star-crossed life, an act of kindness brings them together.
As told in chapters, case by case, killer by killer. From their first, fragile, uncertainties together, to a greater understanding in each other, and of themselves.
"Three a.m. The scream ripped at the alley's blackest shadows, only to be swallowed by concrete and steel. But screams here were too common, and this one would go as unanswered as the rest."
"I am not a practicing psychiatrist, nor am I a priest, and your problems are not confidential unless I decide they are...
"It's business. If it's heart you're looking for, St. Augustine's is only six blocks from the river."
"...and in response to her pain, I felt the chains loosening on my inner animal, readying to obliterate all good judgement. I had jettisoned my psychology studies with blinding black fantasies.
"I opened the car door, reminding myself that action without forethought kills the wrong people."
Logline: A New Orleans Criminal Psychologist with a clouded past, Nicolaus Vagelle, limits his present work to "consulting"...that is, until a serial killer takes one too many, and Vagelle must end the madness.
