Miles Ward, Private Eye
“No, DUMDUM, mONSTERS Aren’t real.”
- Miles Ward
Miles believes in a lot of things. He believes that the bottom of a bottle can put an end to his nightmares. That fists can solve most arguments, but guns can stop them. That everyone is a suspect until they ain’t. That’s a big one.
And he doesn’t believe in faith, or magic, or monsters.
But, what if he’s wrong? What if the sudden change in crime rates have nothing to do with mobsters and crooked cops? What if, running loose in 1940’s Los Angeles, things that go bump in the night actually exist? What if the City of Angels is really a City of Demons?
Or what if that is just what someone wants Miles to think?
The Ruby Rage
Decorated for valor on the Pacific Front in WWII, Miles Ward joined the LAPD, making his way to Homicide by the age of thirty. After the end of a horrific case where he failed to save a kidnapped child, disgraced LA Homicide Detective Ward lives at the bottom of a bottle, his home a folding cot in a delapidated office building. The former cop turned Private Eye is forced to take the sleaziest cases just to make ends meet.
Until one day, when the reason for his disgrace makes him the perfect choice to once again locate a missing child.
When statuesque movie star Bebe Winglace hires him to find her missing little sister, child star Emily, Miles finds himself battling the demons of his past. Confronted with his past failure, Miles finds himself swimming the same waters that led to his downfall and drove him to the loony bin and the bottle.
Follwing the clues to mafia connections in Pittsburgh, PA, Miles finds there’s more to the world than he’d been willing to admit.
His desperate search to find the missing actress leads him to the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles and forces him to ask the question he has been avoiding for five years.
Do monsters really exist?
The Opal Offering
Regina Crest, an up and coming actress for MGM, is found murdered, skinned alive, her body dumped in an alley. Having had contact with two men of color, Bernard and Jacques, recent transplants to the City of Angels from Lousiana, the brothers are immediately pegged by LA Homicide as the prime suspects.
In a city where corrupt police, racism, and fear of anything that deviates from accepted norms of faith lead to immediate suspicion, the two men find themselves caught in a legal system that only cares about closing cases, not finding truth. When it is discovered that they are practitioners of voodoo their ethnicity and religion are the only evidence the LAPD needs to serve them up for the death penalty.
Wheir aunt, a close friend of Detective Ward, asks for his help, he has no choice but to once again confront his disbelief in the occult and all things spiritual.
When his investigation leads him to a sinister creature known as the Bokor, he once again dives into the underworld of Los Angeles.
Miles must race to find the truth before two innocent men are hanged for a crime they didn’t commit.