Books
End of the Vine (2022)
A Daniel Winters Mystery
San Francisco Police Detective Daniel Winters literally has a nose for crime. His sense of smell is so sensitive that a youthful job in a hotel kitchen with its cacophony of aromas nearly drove him mad. But getting out of the kitchen and behind the bar introduced him to the world of wine, which inspired him to become a sommelier. Then he failed the final exam.
A left turn in life landed him at the police academy, which led him to Annie. Their life together was perfect until her illness. In the two years since she died, Dan has barely begun to let her go. She was the reason he chose to work the suicide squad, a choice that's now leading him to work the scenes at a bizarre string of suicides.
These allegedly self-inflicted deaths make no sense. The deceased all had healthy, full lives ahead of them. They had loving families and friends who were puzzled and hurt by recent changes in their loved one's behavior. None of the dead appeared to know each other in life. All of them, in the moments before they died, had uncorked a fine wine, each from a different vineyard.
The details leave Dan searching for answers to questions that none of his colleagues have even thought to ask. Chief calls Dan “Magic Man” because he often seems to pull answers out of a hat. But this time Chief wonders if Magic Dan has lost his hat, and perhaps lost touch with reality.
Forbidden to spend any more official time on these cases, Dan starts looking into them on his own time. He loops in the vivacious, curvaceous, red-haired Kristin, an old friend from sommelier school who’s now in charge of all things wine-related at one the city’s finest restaurants. But even as he follows clues from the first and second suicides, more bizarre deaths taunt him.
To Chief, that’s the job: you rule one death a suicide and move on to the next. To Dan, it’s more personal: families and friends, bewildered and bereaved, have a right to a thorough investigation. Chasing that truth, Dan follows his nose around the city, across the continent, and over an ocean to pursue a truth that no one but he would even have suspected.
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Vine 45
Coming Soon
A series of disappearances in France’s winery region takes a dramatic turn when a dog sniffs out a severed arm among the vines. Summoned by a French colleague, San Francisco Police Department’s Daniel Winters travels back to France, this time to the rolling, vine-covered hills around Avignon.
But the idyllic setting belies a simmering conflict: the old wine families, steeped in generations of winemaking tradition, resent the incursion of a young urban crowd who consider themselves the avant-garde of winemakers. The deeper Dan digs—and the more he learns about the global cultures and local cults that influence the French wine world—the darker the clouds seem to grow as they gather over the vineyards.
Can Dan prune back the vines enough to find the people who have disappeared? Or will this be the murder case that finally overwhelms the World’s Greatest Nose?
Coming soon...