When the phone rings long after midnight, it’s a dead solid certainty bad news and trouble are on the other end of the line. For Dallas private eye Ed Earl Burch, trouble is the lethal kind in Jim Nesbitt’s hard-boiled thriller, The Right Wrong Number, a gritty and relentless saga that races from the gleaming towers and timeworn barrios of Houston to the decadent charms of New Orleans and stark desert mountains of the Texas Big Bend country and northern Mexico.
Burch, a cashiered Dallas homicide detective, is a battered but dogged private investigator with bad knees, a scarred soul and a wounded liver. He’s been hired to protect an old flame in Houston after a body is found in the charred remains of the BMW owned by her missing husband, a high-flying financier.
It’s a simple job that goes wrong fast. Burch finds himself in the middle of a ruthless contest where nothing and nobody can be trusted and money and sex tempt him to break his own rules—temptations served up by the old flame, a rangy and carnal strawberry blonde with a violent temper and a lethal knack for larceny and betrayal. The husband isn’t dead after all: he’s on the run after ripping off the silent partners in his darker deals, some deeply unsavory gentlemen in sleek suits from New Orleans. They give the game a more murderous edge by sending two hitmen to reclaim their stolen goods and kill anybody involved in the score.
When an old Dallas friend gets murdered by hired muscle, Burch blames himself and grimly sets out for vengeance.
Take a deadly ride with Ed Earl Burch. You’ll be glad you did.
Jim Nesbitt 