A Ray Larkin case · free
Economy of Paint
The novella that opens the Ray Larkin series
The story
April 2016. A housepainter with twenty-five years on scaffolds is found dead in a storeroom, and by Monday the file says accident. The firm lays one word on the table without saying it: thief.
His daughter walks into a bar in Inwood and buys the truth the only way it's sold: one day at a time, five hundred a day, receipts for everything. Ray Larkin, three months into a private investigator's license and a year out of a badge, starts with what a wall can tell him. A dry ladder on a day of rain. Two kinds of white in one stairwell. And a man whose whole sin was that he counted everything.
A complete case, and the story of how Ray Larkin got his office, his first client, and the name on the door. Read it before the first novel, or after. It spoils nothing.
What you get
- The whole novella, free — about an hour and a half of reading
- Download for Kindle or any other device as soon as it ships
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The author
Ellis Crowe writes the Ray Larkin books: private-eye novels set in Inwood and Washington Heights, at the northern tip of Manhattan, in the first-person tradition of Chandler and Ross Macdonald. Ellis Crowe is a pen name, stated openly; the work signs for itself.