Nick Sands

“She was the kind of woman who could knock a monk off a celibacy vow at twenty paces.”

Subtitled “A Detective Story for the New Age,” Trick of the Light (1988) introduced “pretty spiritual” San Francisco private eye NICK SANDS who’s hired by his client, Valerie, to find, uh, God.

Yeah.

Valerie Tyrel’s argument to Nick is that “Your ad in the phone book says you can find anybody. If God is everywhere, this ought to be a piece of cake.”

Suffice it to say that it’s not, and the book, according to its publisher, Beyond Words, soon becomes “two people’s spiritual/philosophical question played out against the backdrop of the hard-boiled detective genre… (as) Valerie and Nick encounter some of the most bizarre and thought-provoking characters this side of the looking glass. It is a journey that challenges their assumptions and beliefs about themselves, the nature of reality, and the universe itself.”

Uh-huh.

A former insurance investigator lightly dusted with post-sixties cynicism, Nick has a loft not far from Fisherman’s Wharf (actually the to floor of an old, dilapidated warehouse that’s he’s slowly renovating). He frequent health food stores, meditation centers and spiritual bookstores, and he admits he’s gained a “certain reputation” locally, but he narrates his adventures in a snappy line of patter that’s more Bogey than yogi, which greatly helps ground this tale in a “very Earthy” way.

Trick of the Light was supposedly very well received enough within the New Age crowd that there were rumors of a movie deal. It ultimately fell through, but a sequel novel, Cathedral of the Senses, followed in 2011.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Truth is, Smoke’s something of something of a Shamus Game renaissance man, with his fingers in a lot of pies. He’s a musician and songwriter, author of over two dozen books (including two more traditional hard-boiled novels under the pen name of Hamilton T. Caine, featuring private eye Ace Carpenter) and a filmmaker. He also founded the short-lived Mystery Magazine, and published one of the first online mystery magazines, Hamilton Caine’s Mystery Digest, on CompuServe way back in 1984.

UNDER OATH

• “A masterpiece of inspirational fiction.”
  — Thomas Morris on Trick of the Light
• “Somewhere between Mickey Spillane and Tielhard de Chardin, Trick of the Light provides a kind of nourishment best described as ‘private eye soul food.'”
  — Ralph Blum