The Black Tortoise

by Ronald Tierney

Overview

Peter Strand is half Chinese and half Cherokee and was adopted by an elderly white couple from Phoenix. Now he's a forensic accountant in San Francisco, where he's struggling with his identity.

When his employer asks him to investigate a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization, Strand meets a cast of quirky characters who all seem to be hiding a secret. Peter soon finds evidence of a probable fraud, but when fraud leads to murder, he's drawn deeper into a murky mystery.

The Black Tortoise is the second book in the Peter Strand Mystery series.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781459812406
Publisher:	Orca Book Publishers
Publication date:	03/21/2017
Series:	Peter Strand Mystery , #2
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	4.75(w) x 7.25(h) x 0.35(d)
Lexile:	HL620L (what's this?)
Age Range:	16 Years

About the Author

Ronald Tierney has been nominated for the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award for Best First Novel, and Booklist describes his series featuring semi-retired private investigator “Deets” Shanahan as “packed with new angles and delights.” Before writing mysteries, Tierney was founding editor of NUVO, an Indianapolis alternative newspaper, and the editor of several other periodicals. Ronald lives in San Francisco, where he continues to write.

Editorial Reviews

2017-02-06
A second case for forensic accountant Peter Strand (The Blue Dragon, 2015) ushers him into a San Francisco nonprofit to investigate rumored problems that get a lot bigger and more concrete shortly after his arrival.Peter's biggest client, wealthy, unseen property owner Mr. Lehr, has a finger in so many pies that some of them are inevitably half-baked. Convinced that there's trouble brewing at the Fog City Arts Center, which the Black Tortoise Foundation runs for the city's Port Commission, he bids Peter make the rounds. At the reception in which Peter meets most of the major players—sales and marketing director Craig Anglim, head of operations Marguerite Woodson, client liaison Vanessa Medder—Fog City accountant Emelio Salazar introduces Peter to each of them with a different cover story, an amusing touch that goes nowhere. About the only thing Peter learns, in fact, is that everyone in sight hates newly appointed executive director Madeline Creighton, whose highhanded manner is instantly off-putting. True to form, she puts off her scheduled meeting with Peter, and when he comes in the next morning, he finds a body in the tortoise tank outside the building that, amazingly, isn't Madeline's. David, the dead IT guy, isn't even important enough to have a last name, and the intrigue surrounding his death turns out to be strictly routine as well. A disappointingly perfunctory novella whose main revelation is that when the author of the hard-nosed Deets Shanahan stories (Killing Frost, 2015, etc.) takes off the edge, he takes off quite a bit more along with it.

Kirkus Reviews