Created by Daniel Pease
Pseudonym of Daniel Pearse
In 2023’s Careless, Tampico Bay detective LELAND CHASE takes on the case of a Percy Glaus, as a favor to a friend of a friend of his twenty-something son Ian. Percy’s a student at Kessler Academy, an exclusive college in Waring, a few miles up the road, and he thinks somebody is trying to kill him,.
A former prosecutor in San Francisco recently relocated to the Pacific Northwest, Leland is hesitant, and explains to Percy that he’s now simply a “fifty-dollar-per-hour gumshoe,” whose bread-and-butter is “insurance claims, depositions, lost heirs, and the occasional missing brother-sister-mother,” although he ruefully adds “Found a dog once.”
Sure, his office has a good view, overlooking the Pacific (on a good day, he can see the old Coast Guard station), and one fine day he hopes to hire a receptionist, but he’s not setting the world on fire (and doesn’t want to), and he drives “not-quite-ratty” Jeep.
He thinks maybe Percy’s just being over cautious, but Percy insists, and Leland agrees to poke around, unaware hew’s about to get neck-deep in a swamp of “grade-farming ” and a cheating scandal brewing at Kessler, plus embezzlement, fraud, arson and… murder, of course.
Leland returned in 2025 in Reckless, so I guess it’s going to be a series.
The author says Leland was inspired by John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone.
NOVELS
- Careless (2023) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
- Reckless (2025)
FURTHER INVESTIGATION
- An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down
Eyes of the Pacific Northwest
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
