The Case of
The Whiskey Island Alibi
Vance Sterling: The Cuyahoga Docket Series
Somebody put a loaded .38 in Vivian Novak's apron. Then somebody put a dead man in her path. Cleveland, November 1978. Vivian Novak has been in the papers once already — cleared of a theft she didn't commit, convicted anyway by everyone who read the headline. So when a revolver turns up in her locked locker at the diner, she doesn't call the police. She calls a lawyer. Vance Sterling's instructions are simple: the gun stays in his office safe overnight, she sleeps at a quiet motel in Lakewood, and in the morning he delivers the whole problem to the Homicide captain personally. By midnight the plan is in pieces. A detour through the dark of Whiskey Island, a black sedan running with its lights off, two blind warning shots fired out a car window — and a Lincoln in the shallows of the Cuyahoga with a dead union man behind the wheel, shot through the temple. The Case of the Whiskey Island Alibi is the first case on Vance Sterling: The Cuyahoga Docket — courtroom mysteries in the classic style, set in the analog Cleveland of the late 1970s: fair-play puzzles, shoe-leather investigation, and verdicts turned on evidence the reader has seen all along.