Glory Lane and the Humid Holiday: Dana Sanderson Short Mysteries, #3

By Kari Kilgore

A Strange Case in a Strange Place

A chance to recapture past glory days gone awry.
A cybercrime expert forced to endure warm, sunny weather in December.
A South Florida holiday with two stressed-out techies ending up in the wrong place at the right time.
Will Dana manage to crack the case before it goes from missing person to murder?

A Dana Sanderson Short Mystery

An excerpt from Glory Lane and the Humid Holiday

Dana had always been more comfortable with codes and computers than people.
"We got a missing persons report on Rich Walters a couple of days ago," Michelle said. "Only had a plane ticket to go on. We've had the word out, but he disappeared after he flew into Miami. Not a trace until right here, last night."
Michelle held up one of those evidence bags with a scuffed brown leather wallet inside, with a loose driver's license pressed against the plastic.
Dana glanced the alley where a few uniforms still lingered, heads down. "He's not… Is he over there?"
Michelle looked over her shoulder, then turned back to Dana with a grin.
"Don't worry, Dana. He's not dead, not that we know of. But Rich Walters isn't just missing. He's disappeared into thin air."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Spiral Publishing, Ltd
• Release date: Feb 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393542834

Kari Kilgore

Kari Kilgore started her first published novel Until Death in Transylvania, Romania, and finished it in Room 217 at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, where Stephen King got the idea for The Shining. That’s just one example of how real world inspiration drives her fiction. Kari’s first published novel Until Death was included on the Preliminary Ballot for the Bram Stoker Award for Outstanding Achievement in a First Novel in 2016. It was also a finalist for the Golden Stake Award at the Vampire Arts Festival in 2018. Recent professional short story sales include three to Fiction River anthology magazine, with the first due out in the September issue. Kari also has two stories in a holiday-themed anthology project with Kristine Kathryn Rusch due out over the holidays in 2019. Kari writes fantasy, science fiction, horror, and contemporary fiction, and she’s happiest when she surprises herself. She lives at the end of a long dirt road in the middle of the woods with her husband Jason Adams, various house critters, and wildlife they’re better off not knowing more about. Kari’s novels, novellas, and short stories are available at www.spiralpublishing.net, which also publishes books by Frank Kilgore and Jason Adams. For more information about Kari, upcoming publications, her travels and adventures, and random cool things that catch her attention, visit www.karikilgore.com.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Rich would have sworn the last thirty years of his life never happened. The south Florida night air was warm and perfectly humid even in December, the breeze caressing his face and arms. He’d long ago shed the jacket and button-up shirt he’d worn on the flight, leaving him in a black t-shirt and khakis.

The group of drummers surrounding him looked like a random collection of college kids like he’d been back then. Nothing seemed to link them besides sitting in a loose circle under the palm trees and stars and miles of holiday lights.

Yet the sound they created together drilled into Rich’s flesh and bones, effortlessly hijacking the rhythm of his heart.

Holiday lights strung through the palm trees and over bushes that still held their shiny green leaves had seemed so strange to him as a dumb kid, freshly escaped from the frozen wilds of Ohio. Now that odd combination, along with people strolling the sidewalks of Abrams’s Bay mid-December in shorts and Hawaiian shirts, felt like he’d finally found a lost bit of himself.

He turned to the left, struck by the odd creaking of his neck. The fresh air brought in by passing cars had dissipated as the sun went down. Rich couldn’t find a breath that wasn’t heavy and sweet with drifting clouds of weed.

He cared a lot less than he had an hour ago.

The water bottle he brought to his dry and cracked lips was just as empty as the last several times he’d checked. His mouth felt stuffed full of cotton, his eyes full of grit and sand. That much of his past was just as he remembered.

Rich hadn’t touched a joint or anything else once his thirties faded into his forties and now fifties, tired of the way hours and sometimes days