Westerfield's Chain

"Westerfield's Chain," was first published by St. Martin's in 2002, and was a Shamus Award Finalist. KirkusReviews said: "When someone asks ex-homicide cop Nick Acropolis if he misses being on the job, he replies, "Every fucking day," acknowledging a painful truth. He misses the work, the camaraderie, but most of all the self-respect, that sense of himself as someone who matters, acquired over the 15 years he served as a high-profile Chicago police detective-and snatched from him wrongfully, he insists, by men who knew better. Now Nick's a small-timer, a hand-to-mouth p.i. investigating the peccadilloes of other small-timers and hating every minute of it-as he's hating the minute he serendipitously bumps into spunky young Rebecca Westerfield, who's searching for her missing father while Nick's tracking down the missing witness to a minor auto accident. On the surface, there's not much to connect the two cases, but Nick ever regards a surface as the thin veneer of a secret-in this case, a lot of secrets, most of them nasty, fraudulent, or positively lethal. Before he's through sleuthing, Nick uncovers a multimillion-dollar welfare scam, solves a brutal murder or two, locates Becky's worthless dad, and lightens the lives of a couple of eminently worthwhile ladies. In addition, he gets to experience the heady pleasures of a higher profile once more as he thumbs his nose at the corps of bilious blue-clad bureaucrats who summarily sacked him.
The Chicago Tribune called the book the best mystery of the month and said, "There's a memorable moment [on] virtually every page."