Synopsis
David Freed's first mystery is a stay-up-late-to-finish thriller. It's also got some of the funniest lines - and characters - one is likely to encounter in any mystery, along with a tense and compelling plot and a most original protagonist.
Based in sunny Rancho Bonita - "California's Monaco" as the city's moneyed minions like to call it - Cordell Logan is a literate, sardonic flight instructor and aspiring Buddhist with dwindling savings and a shadowy past. When his beautiful ex-wife, Savannah, shows up out of the blue to tell him that her husband has been murdered in Los Angeles, Logan is quietly pleased. Savannah's late husband, after all, is Arlo Echevarria, the man she left Logan for.
Logan and Echevarria were once comrades-in-arms assigned to a top-secret military assassination team known as "Alpha." The only problem is, the LAPD can find no record of Echevarrias ever having toiled for Uncle Sam. Savannah wants Logan to tell the police what he knows. At first he refuses, but then, relying on his small, aging airplane, the "Ruptured Duck," and the skills he honed working for Alpha, Logan doggedly hunts Echevarria's killer.
His trail takes him from the glitzy Las Vegas Strip to the most dangerous ghettos of inner-city Oakland, from darkened, Russian Mafia haunts in West Los Angeles to the deserts of Arizona. But that's the least of his problems. It is his love-hate relationship with Savannah, a woman Logan continues to pine for in spite of himself, that threatens to consume him.
"All I can say is, 'wow'. For a first novel this one is outstanding. Action-adventure, mystery, death and destruction, what more could a discerning reader want! The author has put together a great story...If you are looking for a superb read, then you can't go wrong here."
--Reviewed by Paul J. for Readers Favorite
About the Author
Transcending worlds of murder, aviation and international counter-terrorism, Flat Spin resonates with a veracity that only an author who knows his subject first hand can deliver. David Freed owns a small plane, was a specialist in both law enforcement and military affairs and during an eighteen year reporting career as an investigative journalist for The Los Angeles Times, was an individual finalist for the Pulitzer Prize's gold medal for Public Service, the highest award in American journalism, and later shared a Pulitzer Prize for the newspaper's coverage of the 1992 Rodney King riots. He reported from the Middle East during Operation Desert Storm, and holds an active security clearance from the US Department of Defense. Freed lives in Santa Barbara, California.
David Freed on Flat Spin (Interviewed by Bruce De Silva):
BD: Pitch Flat Spin to us in 25 words or less.
DF: A wise-cracking government assassin-turned-flight instructor is asked by his ex-wife to help investigate the murder of the man she dumped him for.
BD: Flat Spin, of course, is not really a P.I. novel. How would you place it in the various crime sub-genres? Which writers in that tradition most influenced you, and how?
DF: For better or worse, I m not sure Flat Spin falls squarely in any defined sub-genre of crime fiction. It s not a police procedural. It s not a cozy.
BD: Well, it sure isn t a cozy. I d categorize it as a literary thriller.
DF: If anything, I d say it s a funny whodunit. Logan is a hardboiled bad ass in the mold of Parker s Spenser. He s also a sardonic smart ass ala Gregory McDonald s Fletch. Toss in a reluctant amateur sleuth who flies his own airplane like Sky King, and what you have, I hope, is a book that humors readers more than it horrifies them.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
