Book
The Case of The Time Machine
Series: Vance Sterling: The Cuyahoga Docket
Published September 26, 2026
On Thursday afternoon Eleanor Varga went to pay off the note against her brother’s half of the building. The man who held it would not take her money. At five minutes to nine that night she found him on the floor of his warehouse in the Flats.
Cleveland, in May. Eleanor is sixty-one and four months past a heart attack, and she runs Varga Lithographic, her late father’s print shop on Train Avenue. Her brother Les owns the other half of the building. In March, without a word to her, he mortgaged it.
If the note is not paid by Friday, a company nobody has heard of can buy Les’s half for the amount of the debt, and a co-owner can make the court sell the whole. Eleanor has thirty-one thousand dollars in the company and four of her own. It is not enough, and the man who holds the paper would not have taken it anyway.
She told the police she was there. Her nitroglycerin was on the office floor, in a bottle with her name on the label. A citizen who would not give his name read three letters of her license plate. And the weapon came out of her own pressroom.
Vance Sterling has a client who was in that office, who says so, and who told the detectives she noticed nothing on the floor. The State has everything it needs, and all of it is hers. Sterling means to ask it one question it has not thought to ask.
The Case of the Time Machine is the sixth case on Vance Sterling: The Cuyahoga Docket — courtroom mysteries in the classic style, set in an analog Ohio of typewriters, carbon paper and filing cabinets: fair-play puzzles, shoe-leather investigation, and verdicts turned on evidence the reader has seen all along. A quick-read novel.
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Cleveland, in May. Eleanor is sixty-one and four months past a heart attack, and she runs Varga Lithographic, her late father’s print shop on Train Avenue. Her brother Les owns the other half of the building. In March, without a word to her, he mortgaged it.
If the note is not paid by Friday, a company nobody has heard of can buy Les’s half for the amount of the debt, and a co-owner can make the court sell the whole. Eleanor has thirty-one thousand dollars in the company and four of her own. It is not enough, and the man who holds the paper would not have taken it anyway.
She told the police she was there. Her nitroglycerin was on the office floor, in a bottle with her name on the label. A citizen who would not give his name read three letters of her license plate. And the weapon came out of her own pressroom.
Vance Sterling has a client who was in that office, who says so, and who told the detectives she noticed nothing on the floor. The State has everything it needs, and all of it is hers. Sterling means to ask it one question it has not thought to ask.
The Case of the Time Machine is the sixth case on Vance Sterling: The Cuyahoga Docket — courtroom mysteries in the classic style, set in an analog Ohio of typewriters, carbon paper and filing cabinets: fair-play puzzles, shoe-leather investigation, and verdicts turned on evidence the reader has seen all along. A quick-read novel.
v