Second Skin

by Michael Wiley

Overview

When one of her students is found dead, English teacher Lillian Turner and her husband Johnny are drawn into the subsequent investigation - despite being warned off the case by Lillian's brother, homicide detective Daniel Turner. Just what is Daniel's connection to the dead girl? What does he know that he's not telling Lillian?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780727885340
Publisher:	Severn House
Publication date:	12/01/2015
Series:	A Daniel Turner Mystery , #2
Edition description:	First World Publication
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Michael Wiley was brought up in Chicago, and now teaches literature at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. As well as the Sam Kelson series, he is the Shamus Award-winning author of the Chicago-based Joe Kozmarski PI series, the Daniel Turner and Franky Dast series. His Franky Dast thriller, Monument Road, was nominated for the 2018 Shamus Best PI Novel Award.

Read an Excerpt

Felicity came through the glass door of my office, dragging a wicked trail of truck exhaust and the bitter smell of roadside weeds that always hung over Philips Highway.
‘Cigarette?’ she said. 
She was a tall, black woman, heavy-boned. Her skin, tight over her cheekbones, glistened with sweat. She generally wandered the mile stretch of highway between Emerson and Universitywith a brass-topped cane, though I once saw her with a wooden walking staff topped by a head whittled and painted to look like a grizzly bear. 
‘Cigarette?’ she said again. 
‘I’ve told you I don’t smoke,’ I said. 
‘The hell you don’t.’ She turned to leave. 
The stories said she’d worked this stretch for forty years and more, from before the government built the Interstate, when traffic backed up a quarter-mile at the stoplights and a girl could walk the line ignoring all but the men in Cadillacs. Now, in the two months since I’d set up my agency in the rental, I’d never seen a car stop or slow for her. A guy named Farouk Bashandi, who’d opened a restaurant called Sahara Sandwiches Shop a hundred yards south from me, said he’d once seen her get into a beat-up Chevrolet van, but that was it. Few men fantasized about a sixty-year-old hooker with a gimp leg unless sex had come to smell to them like death and dying. I asked, 
‘How’s business?’ 
‘I’m too old for the butcher,’ she said. ‘You can lead me around on a chain but I can’t carry a load, so what good am I?’ She smiled, and she still had all of her teeth. ‘Business is middling.’

Editorial Reviews

A superbly crafted and well-paced crime story.” “Highly recommended for lovers of dark crime stories.

Florida Times-Union

2015-08-31
A second dose of murderous troubles that hit all too close to home for Jacksonville homicide detective Daniel Turner and his family. Daniel's sister Lillian isn't the type to let things go. So when Sheneel Greene, one of her favorite students, goes missing, she asks her husband, skip tracer Johnny Bellefleur, to see if he can find her. Johnny demurs, but it wouldn't have mattered anyway, for Sheneel's already dead. Since Johnny is another one who doesn't let things go, he asks Daniel for a peek at Sheneel's case file, only to hit the first of many brick walls. There's a file all right, and Daniel shows it to him, but he assures him that there's no case: Sheneel had tried to kill herself three times before, and the fourth time was presumably the charm. There's even a convenient note in the victim's own handwriting. Daniel doesn't seem to care that Sheneel's body was full of drugs that suicides rarely use or that someone's cut off her arm with a sharp implement. Not even the death of Sheneel's half brother, Alex, another very iffy suicide, sways him. So it falls to Johnny, still battling demons from his job bagging combat casualties for the Navy (Blue Avenue, 2014), and his sister to tie the deaths to the villainous Phelps family, whose long history of exploiting North Florida's resources and locals provides far too many suspects—Edward the monstrous patriarch, his rapacious son, Stephen, their wives and unacknowledged children—each of whom takes a turn in the spotlight before yielding to someone who looks even guiltier. Long before the curtain comes down, Lillian won't know who on Earth she can trust, and neither will you. Satisfyingly doom-and-gloomy, even though many readers will balk at the last round of dark revelations and the last spasm of violence that accompanies them.

Kirkus Reviews

"Mr. Wiley's writing style is very reminiscent of James Lee Burke."

C McBride - reviewer

"Second Skin has a powerful literary dimension.” “Vivid portraits of Jacksonville neighborhoods, individual places of residence and work, and landscapes root the novel firmly in the reader’s imagination. A collection of well-drawn minor characters, notably the 60-something prostitute named Felicity and the Gullah leader named Papa Crowe, enrich the narrative tremendously. Mr. Wiley’s portrait of Crowe is a small masterpiece, its subject waiting endlessly for the moment to right the disgrace and betrayal of his community. Do I like, admire and even cherish this book? Indeed I do. It is a powerful follow-up to last year’s Blue Avenue."

Fort Meyers Florida Weekly