Brig Ellis is a new age private investigator with old school values.
When he gets a call from an old flame seeking protection for her
husband, he agrees to help. Seems the hubby is an artist whose star is
ascending. What Brig doesn't know, until he makes contact with the
couple, is that the artist paints with the cremated ashes of human
remains. While the painter's profile is rising, so too is the number of
people less than thrilled with what he is doing--and some of them are
determined to stop him one way or another.
Ellis soon finds himself in the middle of multiple bizarre events that
could be chalked up as accidental mayhem. Of course, they could also be
escalating murder attempts. From wild art house happenings in the
warehouse district to glittering soirees in the manicured mansions of
the upper crust, things get more and more dangerous. A tornado in far
west Texas threatens to level everything and everyone in its path. A
sojourn to Havana, Cuba turns deadly. An art show in Chicago becomes a
nightmare when a Molotov cocktail sets a gallery ablaze. The violence
keeps increasing exponentially, as do the suspects. There are jealous
artists, shady gallery owners, reporters with hidden agendas, outraged
Christian ministers, even Jewish groups who become incensed when they
find that one of the artist's paintings includes the ashes of a
Holocaust survivor.
Ellis struggles to keep the detractors at a distance, the artist safe,
and the old flame from igniting a new spark while he looks for a
potential killer and wrestles with his own convictions about the moral
conundrums surrounding this fascinating but questionable form of DYING
ART.
Joe Kilgore has won awards for his novels, novellas, screenplays, and
short stories. Prior to writing for page and screen, Joe had a long and
successful career in advertising where his television and radio
commercials, plus magazine and newspaper ads, won local, regional, and
international awards for some of the world's largest corporations.
