Big Dog

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Big Dog is a sun-fun-and-crime novel set in Virginia Beach, 1971, with the Vietnam War and a hurricane as backdrops.

Ben Morgan, a young PI, likes his cases simple, good guys versus bad guys, so he can help the good guys. But there’s a murky, shades-of-gray war dragging on in Vietnam. Societal change is blowing in the wind. Nothing’s simple anymore. Certainly not the cascade of crimes and mysteries he finds himself in.

Morgan takes a break on the boardwalk, Labor Day Monday, when a young woman throws off her clothes and runs screaming on the beach. The woman is Abby Dillon, the only daughter of the local kingpin, Jim Dillon. Rumor has it that his poker pals call him Big Dog.

The next day a couple comes down from Richmond. They want Morgan to find their daughter Alice, and make her go back to college. That evening Morgan finds her with a rude hippie named Lefty. But two days later he gets a call from Alice’s roommate. Alice didn’t turn up. Now he needs to find Lefty.

Morgan stops by the Association for Research and Enlightenment, probably the most famous place in Virginia Beach. He encounters a fat man named Dixby Schwartz, a schemer who sees a way to extract money from Jim Dillon. Nine years earlier, Abby Dillon’s boyfriend disappeared mysteriously, murdered or maybe just gone to California. Schwartz thinks he knows what happened.

Meanwhile, a hurricane is churning up the East Coast. A bad storm puts people on edge, and makes them more likely to take chances. When Morgan goes to meet a man in a big waterfront house about a job, he gets knocked out, and wakes up next to a corpse named Dixby Schwartz.

Morgan is a levelheaded guy, tough if he has to be, a bit of a kidder, loyal to his girlfriend Sue. He’s rattled as mystery piles on top of threat. The only thing Morgan can do is charge forward, confront people, solve the crimes before they overwhelm him. He would like to beat Big Dog on his own turf. But staying alive is a big victory all by itself.