Fadeaway Joe: A Novel

Pursued by labor traffickers, Paula Jessup desperately needs someone in her corner. Her unlikely savoir is an aging bouncer with early-onset dementia, grappling with his own ghosts. All they have to do is trust each other.

At first glance, Paula thinks she's found her protector in sixty-four-year-old Joe Pendergast, a famous bouncer in Hampton Roads. Even though he is ancient by her standards - sixty-four years old and counting - he still packs a punch. He's more than a match for the traffickers who want to find her.

 But then she learns Joe has been diagnosed with early-onset dementia. She also discovers he was much more than a bouncer. He worked as an enforcer and collector for a local loan shark for more than forty years. He has been cut loose due to his dementia diagnosis, and now he's plotting to kill his old boss before the disease takes him.

For Joe, Paula's problems are nothing more than a distraction. He has a murder to plan. But the more he learns about her background, the more he wants to help her. And the more Paula learns about Joe, she wants him to find real purpose. Why kill someone when you can ruin him? Theirs is a dark partnership, but it just might save them both.

Hugh Lessig spent more than thirty years as an award-winning newspaper reporter, covering everything from city council meetings to the earthquake in Haiti. Along the way, he’s met people at the highs and lows of life and interviewed accused murderers and governors, welders and lawyers, and old men who fought our nation’s wars. Born in eastern Pennsylvania, he moved to Hampton Roads, Virginia, in 1997. His short stories have appeared in Thuglit, Shotgun Honey, Crime Factory and Needle. In addition, his work is featured in the following anthologies: Mickey Finn 21st Century Noir, Volumes I and II; Groovy Gumshoes: Private Eyes in the Psychedelic Sixties; and Guns & Tacos. Fadeaway Joe is his first novel.