Footsteps in the Dark

About Footsteps in the Dark

The snick of a lock. The squeak of door hinges. The creak of a floorboard.

Are those approaching steps that of a lover or an enemy?

Entrée to Murder. After a steady diet of big city trouble, Chef Drew Allison moved to the island town of Orca’s Slough to get a taste of life in the slow lane. But hometown hospitality goes stale when he finds a dead body in the basement of his own Eelgrass Café.

Twelve Seconds. A mysterious phone call, a missing executive, and an exploding rocket throw space reporter Justin Harris and Air Force Special Agent Greg Marcotte into an investigation that will change their lives…if it doesn’t kill them first.

Reality Bites. Detective Cabot Decker is called to the set of hotshot TV producer Jax Thornburn’s reality-TV show after a contestant is mauled to death by a tiger. Is someone trying to ax Jax’s career—or Jax himself?

Blind Man’s Buff. A game of Capture the Flag turns deadly inside an abandoned shopping mall when Tommy and Jonah stumble into a homicidal maniac’s hunting grounds.

A Country for Old Men. Inspector Calum Macleod has returned to the Western Isles of Scotland to bury a part of himself he can’t accept. But the island has old secrets of its own. When a murderer strikes, Calum finds his past can’t be so easily escaped.

Pepper the Crime Lab. When Lonnie Boudreaux’s neighbor is murdered, he must foster the man’s dog, befriend a mysterious former cop, and stop the killer—or else!

Lights, Camera, Murder. When a hotshot television producer hires him to recover a stolen script, NY PI Rory Byrne must go undercover on the set of the ground-breaking historical drama The Bowery—a job complicated by Rory’s unexpected attraction to handsome, talented, and out-and-proud actor Marion Roosevelt.

Stranger in the House. Miles Tuesday’s memories of Montreal are happy ones, but now that he has inherited the mansion at 13 Place Braeside, everything feels different. Was Madame Martel’s fatal fall really an accident? And who is stealing her treasures?

One thing has not changed: Miles still wants handsome and sophisticated art dealer Linley Palmer to have a place in his life.

Authors L.B. Gregg, Nicole Kimberling, Josh Lanyon, Dal Maclean, Z.A. Maxfield, Meg Perry, C.S. Poe, and S.C. Wynne join forces for Footsteps in the Dark, eight sexy and suspenseful novellas of Male/Male Mystery and Romance

.

FOOTSTEPS IN THE DARK

An M/M Mystery Romance Anthology

Introduction

Motive.

For me, the most interesting aspect of any mystery or crime story is the Why? What makes people do the things they do? Why are some people driven to commit crimes? Why are some people committed to solving them?

And why do we fall in love with the people we do?

It’s the need to explore that element of unpredictability in human interaction that compels me to write—and guides my reading choices. My favorite M/M stories are those that blend mystery and romance in equal measures, and when I turn that last page I want to be convinced that our sleuth has the right man in handcuffs. On or off the job.

The eight stories in this anthology deliver on the promise to explore that why and wherefore with plenty of spine-tingling mystery and suspense as well as healthy dollops of sweet and spicy romance. But what I love even more about Footsteps in the Dark is the variety and unity of this collection.

Here you’ll find private eyes, police detectives, and unlucky bystanders rubbing shoulders (and other body parts) with artists, actors, chefs, journalists, and other unlucky bystanders. You’ll discover crimes of cold-blooded calculation and crimes of pure and unadulterated crazy. Three stories—Nicole Kimberling’s clever culinary cozy Entrée to Murder, S.C. Wynne’s smart and sassy take on Hollywood vs. Real Life in Reality Bites, and Meg Perry’s adroit and original police procedural Twelve Seconds—kick off brand new series.

The authors gathered between these pages offer a variety of scenes and settings. Dal Maclean’s haunting A Country for Old Men is set in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. Montreal, Canada is the backdrop for my mysterious morsel Stranger in the House. L.B. Gregg’s heart-stopping Blind Man’s Buff takes place in an abandoned mall in Anywhere USA.

We have old love and we have new. An ailing chef gets a second chance at love in Z.A. Maxfield’s Pepper the Crime Lab, and it’s very nearly love at first sight for an idiosyncratic private detective in Lights. Camera. Murder. by C.S. Poe.

In short, whatever your motive in picking up this anthology, I feel sure you’ll find something here to amuse, entertain, and maybe even enlighten.

—Josh Lanyon

Entrée to Murder by Nicole Kimberling

After a steady diet of big city trouble, Chef Drew Allison moved to the island town of Orca’s Slough to get a taste of life in the slow lane. But hometown hospitality goes stale when he finds a dead body in the basement of his own Eelgrass Café.

Chapter One

When I saw the crumpled tower of waxed corrugated boxes filled with sweating tomatoes and limp romaine slumped on the back stair at eleven a.m., I knew it would be another rough lunch service at the Eelgrass Bistro.

Doubtless, if I were to go around to the front of the building, I would find Evelyn, my favorite octogenarian, peering through the window, wondering what fate had befallen my business partner, Samantha, that would cause her to fail to open our restaurant.

That’s the problem with being unreliable around older people—they’re at a time in life when any failure to appear means the absentee is most likely deceased. Or if not actually dead, the no-show could be lying somewhere injured and alone.

I needed to get in there to make sure Evelyn didn’t do anything rash. Already once this month she’d dialed 911 after she’d spied Sam slumped over in the kitchen. In reality, Sam had just spent the night partying and then fallen asleep on a sack of potatoes in the back.

I sidled past the abandoned produce order to let myself in the back door of the Eelgrass Bistro, only to find it had been unlocked all night. Again.

Perfect.

With the lights off, the restaurant became a long tunnel leading from the service entry where I stood to the ornate doors and large windows up front.

Our restaurant sat mid-block in a row of Victorian brick buildings in the historic heart of downtown Orca’s Slough, a six-block town on Camas Island in the middle of Puget Sound. The building’s sandstone facade formed an almost perfect square: twenty feet high and twenty feet wide and stretched back nearly one hundred feet from sidewalk to alley—though the turn-of-the-century basement stretched much farther underground.

I squinted through the gloom of the kitchen and dining room to see Evelyn pressing her cupped hands against the plate-glass window to peer inside. Despite being in her mid-eighties, her loose-fitting jeans and sweatshirt lent her the look of a spindly kid. Her shock of short gray hair bristled atop her head like a raccoon skin cap. I hurried through the kitchen, flipped on the lights, and waved at her. I made it a big, theatrical, flagging-down-a-passing-ship motion so that she could see me through the haze of the cataracts she regularly claimed kept her from reading various CLOSED signs and KEEP OUT postings around town.

She waved back and went to stand in front of the door, waiting, like a cranky old cat, to be let inside and fed.

As I sidestepped the concrete stairs leading into the basement, my eyes adjusted to the gloom.

The Eelgrass was a wreck. Floors unswept, the steel prep tables in the kitchen strewn with debris. Dank, fetid water stood in the three-compartment sink. Empty, unwashed beer glasses on every surface. Party detritus.

I wondered if Sam had left any money in the till or if that too had fallen victim to poor impulse control.

I took a breath.

Getting angry would do me no good. First, there was no one here to be angry with, and second, mentally raging at Sam would only force a confrontation that would end in tears. Her remorseful tears. And I had no defense against that kind of emotional blackmail.

I could do nothing but give myself up to the ridiculousness of this day and try to enjoy it like some kind of tragicomedy I was watching from afar.

How much longer could my pride take it? I didn’t know. For as long as I could turn my anger at her inward to fester as shame for consenting to enter this business venture at all? Six months, perhaps? Assuming I had enough nostalgia to sustain me.

Sam and I hadn’t always been this way. Years ago I had adored her freewheeling spirit and sincerity. Back then, I and my then-boyfriend had hung out with her and her then-husband. Together we’d manned a high-end hipster restaurant in Seattle and spent three boozy years feeling impressed with ourselves and the newness of being adults.

But that had been before her husband started having his ongoing series of affairs and all of Sam’s enthusiasm had devolved into personal makeovers and increasingly potent bouts of self-medication. My own private life had mirrored Sam’s, with my boyfriend declaring that he needed the support of a less opinionated lover to truly feel appreciated. By that time, the restaurant started losing money, and my paychecks began to bounce like pinballs ricocheting off every possible overdraft fee imaginable.

So when Sam announced that she’d inherited a restaurant space from a distant cousin, I agreed to pull up stakes, empty what was left of my bank account, and venture into a partnership with her far from Seattle.

Well, not that far. Twenty-five miles and a ferry ride. But still: I’d left town. That was the important thing.

We’d been determined to put the bad times behind us.

Now the dining room at the Eelgrass looked like old times: the tables and chairs stood huddled together in one corner as though ordered to stand aside to make floor space for an impromptu after-hours dance party, which is most likely exactly what had happened.

Probably half the people in the local restaurant industry had been here getting loaded last night.

I walked behind the bar, hoping to find nothing alarming, and stopped dead in my tracks.

Lying prone and snoring on the floor was the seventeen-year-old dishwasher, Lionel.

He was half-Black and half-Korean and had yet to decide if he wanted to talk like a cartoon character or a member of N.W.A. Most of the time he just sounded like a dork. But he was a smart dork and a quick learner.

I nudged Lionel with my toe. Time to wake up, kid.

Lionel lifted his face to squint at me. His cheek was marked with a hexagonal impression from the rubber fatigue mat he’d spent the night on. He had a slim build—more or less a replica of his Asian mother’s. His skin was the color of dark mahogany. The combination ensured that no member of either race ever immediately recognized him as one of their own, which had caused Lionel to develop the bad habit of making gratuitously racist comments that, when challenged, allowed him to clarify his identity.

Quit kicking me, chief, he mumbled.

Quit sleeping on the job, and I will, I said. Now get up and open the door. Evelyn wants her breakfast.

Why can’t you let her in?

"’Cause I told you to. Why the hell are you sleeping here anyway?"