A brilliant young geologist is bludgeoned to death after his firm reports a mammoth gold find. Homicide detective Harry Stark must determine whether the man was killed because he was going to expose the report as a fake, or did a twisted romantic affair lead to his murder?

Also available at:

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iBooks | Kobo |

Excerpt

Above the dead man, on the wall, hung a framed cover of Financial Post magazine: the person on the cover unusually young and oddly dressed. The heading was “The Midas Touch,” so right away you’d put Financial Post and “The Midas Touch” together, and you’d expect to see a picture of an older businessman or some hotshot wunderkind buyout artist. You’d expect the right uniform: the dark suit, maybe a bright Paisley tie, the perfectly styled haircut. But the picture on the magazine’s cover was of a kid.

He’d been twenty-seven at the time the photograph was taken, in August 1992, four years and nearly five months before the present day, but he looked eighteen. The man wore a Tilley hat and the whole Tilley bush outfit, shirt and pants. The hat was pushed back on his head, and his blond hair hung stringy over his forehead, finger-combed at best. He was grinning, a little sheepish and yet a little cocky, a gee-whiz kid posing for a picture he knew his mom would see. This kid was no high-rolling stock promoter, no big deal-maker, not even a market-busting entrepreneur. He was a geologist and a genius, and the Midas touch referred to his success at finding treasure hidden by nature deep within the earth that glowed and clinked and made him, but mostly made the people he worked for, a hell of a lot of money. His name was Chris Harper, and young Chris would never be posing for another magazine cover, or any other picture his mother would see. His face lay on the keyboard of his computer, and he would never grin again.

MEET THE AUTHOR