Nocturne for Madness
Robb White
Author Bio
Robb White lives in Northeastern Ohio close to the house where he grew up. Many of his crime stories and novels feature series character Thomas Haftmann, most recently Nocturne for Madness (New Pulp Press, 2016). He has two noir mysteries: When You Run with Wolves (Number Thirteen Press, UK, 2013) and Waiting on a Bridge of Maggots (Grand Mal, 2015). He also has a collection of short stories comprising a mix of mainstream and crime fiction: ‘Out of Breath’ and Other Stories (Red Giant Press, 2013). One story in that collection had been selected by the editors of 10,000 Tons of Black Ink of Chicago as one of its 6 Best Of for 2009. A crime ebook Special Collections won the Electronic Book Competition of 2014 hosted by New Rivers Press (Mankato State University).
Description
Nocturne for Madness is about the controlled madness of two men, one a former cop, the other a killer of women. Ohio private investigator Thomas Haftmann is hounded by his twin demons of gambling and drinking when he is thrust into a statewide manhunt for the serial killer sensationalized in the tabloid press as the “Jack-in-the-Box Killer,” named for his grotesque crime scenes the police discover in his wake.
As the hunt closes in around him, the killer becomes more deranged, more disorganized in his mayhem until a voice in his head guides him to attempt the unthinkable in a catastrophic event that will bring him a final immortality. The killer will use his special gifts of spatial perception and superhuman strength to sabotage the pipes in the feedwater system of a nuclear power plant situated on the shores of Lake Erie. The nightmare result is the China syndrome of exposed nuclear rods.
Haftmann’s own mental instability is also accelerating as the trail leading to the Jack-in-the-Box killer grows warmer. As feuding biker gangs threaten to rip Haftmann’s resort town apart, he follows his own instincts to guide him to the man who has been killing women all over the state unaware that the killer is rapidly implementing his plot to kill tens of thousands of innocent people.
When a riot breaks out and violence prevents Haftmann from confronting his man, the killer escapes in the chaos and later emerges in the very heart of the nuclear beast he plans to unleash on an unsuspecting population—but the obsessive Haftmann is not far behind. The question is whether the damaged Haftmann, dragging his own shame and guilt behind him, can find his man a second time before a mushroom cloud of radioactive poison spreads across the land.
Book excerpt
Nocturne for Madness
“No pleasure [in life] but meanness.”
–the Misfit, Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”
Winter, Jefferson-on-the-Lake, Northern Ohio
Chapter 1
Thomas Haftmann dreamed all night of ortolans. Those delicate birds like sparrows that French gourmands cooked in their own grease and were eaten whole, the birds’ feet sticking out of the eaters’ mouths. The tiny bills being spat onto expensive plates. He had seen it once like that in New Orleans. They wore sheets over their heads to keep blood and hot juices spattering anyone nearby.
The ortolans were held by tiny strings to their feet and were gently nibbling cracked corn from his hand. One by one he ate them, indifferent to the gore jetting from his mouth as he clamped his jaws around each bird. He could not get enough of them; they were sticky and sweet. In the logic of dreams their feathers would fall away before he ate them so that he tasted nothing but flesh.
He awoke with the taste lingering and his mouth full of saliva. He remembered fragments of his dream and wondered if the juncos and titmice he threw seed and bread scraps to all winter long were playing into his subconscious.
He thought: I may die in this hellhole. He cranked himself off the sofa, a red velour job he’d picked up on the cheap at the Goodwill store, went into the kitchen and, out of some masochistic whim, microwaved stale coffee.
Shower, shave, work—another morning’s uninspiring routine beckoned. Being self-employed, so long out of harness from Cleveland homicide, had lost its joy. He knew he had to see a woman about her son. How his thirteen-year-old corpse had come to be sprawled across her kitchen floor with most of his brain matter excavated from his skull. Haftmann had an uneasy relationship with the Lake cops and their cranky chief. He was allowed him to poach on their territory from time to time as long as he remembered he was no longer a cop and was (he would say) merely mortal; some in the precinct would say much, much less than mortal. “Gumshoe” and “shamus” weren’t altogether passé as slang references to his private investigation career, but “window peeper” and “snoop” were more common among the Lake cops he encountered. Like the crow’s-feet around his one good eye or the gray spreading outward and spilling downward from his crown, he was aware that time was passing faster with each birthday. Unfortunately, he wasn’t growing a thicker skin with each passing season. His concern that life was shortening as he aged was borne out by science and by the fear that he would never have enough money to live decently in retirement because he intended to jettison his second career as soon as he was able to. Haftmann was forced to define “decently” as having sufficient beer money because he had re-acquired a bad habit from the early years of his marriage to a woman who had decided he was the particular baggage she needed to jettison in middle age.
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Genre Fiction
Author Website
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001JP338Q