Hot Springs

A Bradley Foster Novel: The Adventures of a Rookie PI

A young former Marine, Bradley Foster, decides to leave his job as the manager of a custom car shop in Tyler Texas to follow his dream of becoming a rookie private investigator in Hot Springs, Arkansas. He is intrigued by Hot Springs legacy of gangsters, movie stars, and athletes that came to Hot Springs for its thermal mineral baths. There, he is befriended by a rich heiress, Lucy Raines, that owns a small building in downtown that contains a flower shop and a vacant upstairs room for rent. She tells him that the room had been used by Stanley Smith, a private investigator, who has been missing for over a month, and that she will pay him to locate Smith. The apartment comes with a clairvoyant dog named Sherlock.
His search for Stanley leads to the case he was working on, a missing woman from New York, Darlene Donacelli, who was working in the Hot Saddle nightclub at the Oakwood Racetrack and Casino, owned by Lucy’s sometimes lover and the son of a retired New York gangster, Pauly Descantes. Brad meets Lucy’s daughter Kim who claims to be Sherlock’s co-owner. Kim joins him on his sleuthing adventure, and even goes undercover in the Casino.
His search for clues to Stanley and Darlene’s disappearances leads him to the Clark County morgue downstream from Hot Springs and then out to Las Vegas. In the end, he is forced to make difficult decisions about his life and his occupation when all clues to the murders point to people close to him.