Street Level — Bob Truluck

Winner of the 1999 St. Martin's Press/ PWA Award for Best First Private Eye Novel

When we meet private detective Duncan Sloan he's just handed back a five thousand-dollar check meant as advance payment on a job. The wealthy prospective client wants Sloan to find a woman with an eyeball tattooed on her bottom. All he knows is the tattoo, that she's very young, white and probably somewhere in or near Orlando, Florida, Sloan's hometown. Thanks but no thanks; that's not enough. But when the five grand reappears in Sloan's mailbox, he uses it for a Costa Rican vacation and never mind the job.

Pike, however tracks him down. When he explains the assignment, Sloan finds it bizarre enough to say "yes." Isaac Pike is the only son of a top-ranked tycoon. He is also gay. Because he genuinely wants to be a father, he has deposited sperm with a reputable clinic while he searches for a suitable mother. But a paroled convict working at the clinic steals the sperm, impregnates a teenager with it, and blackmails Pike - send money or we abort the child.

Although Pike's idea of a suitable mother is not quite a waif from an Orlando trailer park, he is decent enough to be genuinely concerned about both mother and child.

Sloan pursues the thief and his buddies and, he hopes, the girl, through the Florida city's sad neighborhoods and outlying cheap motels, calling on his drug-enhanced informers and a contact in the police. Getting closer brings him to the mangled bodies of the young mother-to-be's relatives, and closer to his own danger as well. On he goes -- Duncan Sloan may be a reluctant detective, but when he's wound up he's hard to stop.

Street Level is Bob Truluck's first novel. It was chosen as the Best First Private Eye Novel of 1999 in the contest sponsored by Private Eye Writers of America and St. Martin's Press.