Gideon Rimes

Private investigator Gideon Rimes, a black Iraq War vet and a retired Army CID detective, thought he’d left behind the danger of the battlefield. He serves subpoenas, finds witnesses, and provides background checks for better pay and little use of his trusty Glock. But then he’s hired to protect sultry, young blues singer Indigo Waters from her stalker ex-boyfriend - a hotheaded cop who also serves as a driver and bodyguard for the Buffalo mayor.

Holidays are the time of new beginnings. Still on the mend from a bullet to the shoulder, private investigator Gideon Rimes is embracing his budding relationship with attorney Phoenix Trinidad and the Buffalo Police Department’s tenuous new respect. But the honeymoon period is cut short when a missing person case comes to Driftglass Investigations.

Jasper Hellman, the surviving spree killer taken down by then Buffalo State security officer Gideon Rimes, is plotting payback from his Attica cell. In addition to busily watching his back after Hellman’s reach manages to get past the prison walls, private investigator Rimes is hired to ensure the safety of Drea Wingard, a best-selling author and cultural lightning rod who’s headed to Buffalo as the keynote speaker of a major diversity and inclusion conference.

Private Investigator Gideon Rimes knows he’s lucky, a survivor over the years. Now months after the first anniversary of the pandemic, a sense of mortality lingers over Nickel City. The changed landscape includes word of crime lord Lorenzo Quick’s passing whose regime is imploding as a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act case is being avidly built by the ADA. Yet in the territorial vacuum, opportunistic and unpredictable successors emerge. The case takes a twist when a drive-by shooting at an outdoor concert shares a link and jeopardizes Rimes’s personal world.

Collected here are intersecting tales not just about Rimes but about friends, antagonists, and passersby who move through his world. Included are his first case as a PI, two pieces written by Bobby Chance, the backstory of a trial that shaped a friendship, the whereabouts of the Spider after his departure from Buffalo, and a novelette (inspired by two historic murder cases) that puts Rimes in the presence of someone truly demonic.