Blonde Gambit

Matt Mathews Investigations

By: M C Neuffer

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

San Francisco, 1949. A blonde in a red dress walks into a private investigator's office with a missing fiancé and a story that doesn't add up from the first word.

Matt Mathews isn't your standard issue PI. Stanford fullback turned Naval Intelligence officer turned gentleman detective, he works cases that interest him from the comfort of a yacht he keeps in the San Francisco Yacht Club — and from instincts sharpened by four years of digging into everything the Navy preferred un-sniffed. When Suzette Gamble hires him to find her missing fiancé Freddy, he expects a domestic tangle. What he finds is something considerably darker: wartime contraband, mob money, forged documents, and a family secret that would collapse the Gamble dynasty if it reached the society pages.

BLONDE GAMBIT is the first Matt Mathews investigation — crackling, atmospheric, and built on the machinery of classic hard-boiled fiction with a protagonist who is wry where Marlowe was bitter, wealthy where Spade was broke, and just as capable of walking into a room full of the wrong kind of people without blinking.

PANDORA'S BOX, the second investigation, in which the Navy comes to Mathews with a problem they can't officially have. Classified radar components from two depots have vanished. The paperwork is clean. The inside man could be any of six people. And the freight operation moving the stolen parts has a principal whose history is incomplete in ways that interest certain three-letter organizations with no names on their doors.

Christine, Mathews's brilliantly dangerous partner — and eventual wife — comes fully into her own in Pandora's Box. In a conference room full of Navy brass and a nameless civilian from an agency that officially doesn't have opinions, she asks the question nobody else will. She gets the answer. They both know what it costs.

Two investigations. One city that sleeps like a person with a secret — lightly, restlessly, one eye always half-open to the dark.

For readers who want their noir smart, their fog thick, and their San Francisco exactly as morally complicated as it has always been.