From award-winning literary criminologist and bestselling crime novelist R. Barri Flowers, author of the legal thrillers Persuasive Evidence and Justice Served, comes the first novel in the private eye crime series, Dead in the Rose City (A Dean Drake Mystery).

A cross between film noir crime dramas and classic hard-boiled fiction, Dead in the Rose City is a taut detective novel where nothing is quite what it seems other than cold-blooded murder. Dean Jeremy Drake, nicknamed D.J., is a Jamaican-Italian American private investigator and ex-homicide detective for the Police Bureau in Portland, Oregon. He is six-five, hip, tough, armed with a .40 caliber Glock, and courts danger and romance with equal abandon in Portland, dubbed the Rose City, in the Pacific Northwest.

These qualities are put to the test when Drake takes on two seemingly unrelated cases. In one, a gorgeous blonde named Catherine Ashley Sinclair hires him to see if her husband is being unfaithful. In the other, Drake is asked by Frank Sherman, the Deputy District Attorney for Multnomah County, to track down a drug trafficker nicknamed “The Worm.”

The more he investigates, the more Drake realizes the cases are intricately and dangerously connected. It literally becomes a life and death issue as he is framed for murder, nearly killed, and falls prey to seduction. He has to use all of his detective skills and then some to fit all the pieces together in a deadly, high stakes whodunit and why.

Bonus material includes a complete mystery suspense short story, “Gone But Never Forgotten,” and excerpts from R. Barri Flowers’ bestselling mystery and thriller novels: Before He Kills Again, Dead in Pukalani, Murder in Honolulu, and Persuasive Evidence.