Where Fools Dare to Tread: A Monk Buttman Mystery

Some men choose invisibility the way others choose religion. Monk Buttman has made an art of it. A 1964 Ford Falcon, second-hand suits, no phone, and a courier job that asks him to carry envelopes, memorize phrases, and ask nothing. In a city of ten million people, that makes him essentially nobody. Exactly how he likes it.

But when a routine delivery ends with a body bleeding out on an office floor and a woman vanishing with a satchel of cash, Monk's carefully constructed anonymity begins to unravel at every seam.

As he drifts through the moral underbelly of Los Angeles alongside the least qualified detective partnership the city has ever produced, the documents he was carrying begin to reveal the outline of something old, buried, and worth killing for. Beautiful women pull him into orbits he never asked for. Dangerous men start appearing at his door. And a past he left behind on a California farm road years ago begins dragging itself back into the light.

This is emotionally rich literary noir at its most honest, a hardboiled mystery with real warmth beneath its laconic, cynical surface, built for readers who want the atmosphere of classic Los Angeles neo-noir and the ache of something genuinely human beneath it.

Being nobody in a city of ten million is a choice. Staying nobody, Monk Buttman is about to discover, is a luxury.

Can a man who spent years perfecting the art of disappearing survive the moment the world finally decides to see him?

An engineer for 40 years, David William Pearce, following open heart surgery, decided to pursue his muse and write. After completing a debut novel, Pearce so enjoyed the experience that he began writing the Monk Buttman series. When not writing, Pearce is the accomplished recording artist, Mr. Primitive. He and his wife live in Kenmore, Washington.