Cover copy for Getting Lucky

Here is the copy for the back cover of Getting Lucky, due out this month:

I woke up in the dark, shivering to the bone while searing pain sent yellow and purple flashes across my eyes. I could hear the wind but couldn’t feel it. Maybe this was hell, where eternal punishment came as a grab-bag of assaults to the skull, the back, the noseGod, the stench! My maker must have condemned me to die and smell my own rotting flesh, its cold vapors drifting up to my nose and corroding my insides as well. Mixed with the smell of Clay Webster’s carcass was a sweeter smell, but one no less sickening: I must have drunk myself to death with cheap booze and fallen into a slag heap of unrecycled waste.

Maybe I could come back in another life and try again. In my next life I would study library science. Librarians didn’t go to hell. They didn’t wake up face down in turkey carcasses, smelling like peach brandy, feeling like they’ve been sleeping in a.

I looked straight up and saw the stars.

I was in a Dumpster.

HARDCOVER FLAP/PAPERBACK COPY

When beautiful Bonita Esquivez hires P.I. Clay Webster to find her husband, Lucky, Clay expects an easy missing-person case. But when Bonita bites a poisoned bonbon, more than a quick buck is at stake. Clay needs to establish exactly who Lucky is and determine if his client could be lying to him.

Fifty-five-year-old Clay Webster knows pain; he lost his thirty-year marriage, his son, Sean, and his twenty-eight-year police career. Trying to build a new life, his wit is his weapon, and humor is his first line of defense against life’s assaults. His search for Lucky centers primarily on Lowell, Massachusetts, where he tries to save a drowning teenager in a canal and hires yet another teenager, Denton La Rock Junior, who has been making prank phone calls to his home. Clay looks for links between Lucky and A Touch of Love, the new porn shop in town.

Meanwhile, Senator Carleton Swinburne rails against the city’s perceived moral decay, personified partly by ex-cops such as Clay Webster. Perhaps Chantal Ladoute, Clay’s old friend the ex-nun, will be his moral gyroscope as he navigates an increasingly dangerous course.