Every Able Body (Kindle and ePub)

It's 1943, and Mobile, Alabama, is a wartime boomtown filled with bedlam and intrigue.

The Old South coastal city is under siege by thousands who have left the backwoods and overworked cotton fields to seek their fortune in the city's shipyards and new Army airfield.

Shantytowns and tents shelter those who aren't crammed into every available room and boarding house. Garbage and sewage problems trigger rumors of typhoid and out on the streets, young women are disappearing.

The city's police force is undermanned and overworked, leaving the fate of the missing girls in the hands of three people with very different motives: private investigator Frank Lundy, a football legend who's 4-F and sensitive about it; police reporter Valerie Gilbreath, a former debutante and Mardi Gras queen; and Alfred Page, an AWOL black soldier targeted for murder by a manic swamp dweller named Claude Gagnon.

Mobile’s assortment of thieves, thugs, prostitutes, and pimps are solid citizens compared to Gagnon (called “A genuinely creepy villain” by Publishers Weekly), who comes to town looking for Page and supports himself by doing dirty work for a white slavery ring operating out of a waterfront bar. One thing they all agree on is that Sally McGinn never should have gone down to the neon district on a school night.