The Colfax Avenue Series
The longest city street in the USA, Colfax Avenue runs some fifty miles from the Rocky Mountain foothills to the Kansas-like plains east of Denver. Once reputedly and perhaps apocryphally described in Playboy magazine as the “longest, wickedest street in America,” the avenue runs past city and state capitol buildings, along the southern edge of Downtown Denver, but most notably through eclectic stretches of neon kitsch on the metropolitan area’s flanks.
The mysteries in the Colfax Avenue Series feature security guards and salesclerks, lawyers and politicians, streetwalkers and derelicts, panhandlers and street hustlers, and even the occasional solid citizen who all give the artery its sketchy charm.
The Cast
Liliane Dupuis – aka Alexandra Farone, aka Louisa May Alcott, aka . . . well, the list goes on from there. Disgraced former software engineer, current convenience store salesclerk, and part-time street-level amateur detective. Liliane is genius-level smart, wise in the way of sarcasm, and incurably socially inept. Living one good probation screw-up from rocking an orange jumpsuit in the state pen, she nevertheless finds it difficult to resist trouble’s gravitational pull.
Louise “Blue Lou” Hennessey – Formidable as an executioner’s favorite axe, Lou rules her mini crime empire from the grungy grandeur of the Ruston, Colfax Avenue’s most legendary and notorious dive bar.
The Boys – Siward and Riley, Lou’s block-shaped and blockheaded sons. Neither is likely capable of beating a bucket of cement in a game of Scrabble, but they can do beatdowns real good.
Doug – Liliane’s boss at HappyMart, he takes the word manage out of management. He’s actually her ideal supervisor – ineffectual, frequently absent, and totally blackmailed.
Short Ed, Lester, Marvelous Marv, and many others – Colfax Avenue’s alcohol-fueled vagrant elite.
Maddie, Abs, Dayne, Bentley – Liliane’s fellow inmates at HappyMart.
Cecilia “Cici” Monroe – Liliane’s roommate and best friend. As flighty, frivolous, and gregarious as Liliane is nerdy and asocial, she theoretically shouldn’t be able to exist in her friend's vicinity without threatening to rip asunder the space-time continuum.
Stupid Gravity
What if you CAN’T go to the police?
Disgraced software engineer Liliane Dupuis is genius-level smart, wise in the way of sarcasm, and incurably socially inept. She’s also living in her car, a forty-year-old blue Mustang fastback with one primer gray fender. She’s on probation, having allowed a manipulative ex-boyfriend to drag her into a failed ATM hacking scheme. And she’s unemployed in 2010 when finding a job is tough even for those unburdened with a felony conviction. When Liliane witnesses the abduction of a little girl from a homeless shelter, she doesn’t figure her new bottom-rung reality carries the risk tolerance for getting involved.
With funds dwindling to desperation level, she uses a fake ID to land a job at a convenience store on a seamy stretch of Denver’s Colfax Avenue. Less than a week into her new salesclerk career, Liliane watches as the shelter kidnapper walks into her store. It’s not a coincidence, she knows. Just karma continuing to mess with her.
A call to the police might or might not get the abductor locked up, but the exposure of Liliane’s parole violation will absoluely land her on a Sheriff’s bus headed for the state pen. Instead, she must use her resourcefulness, hacking skills, and ruthlessly logical gray matter to track down the kidnapper and rescue the little girl.
Available on Amazon
Shadow Girl
Even a Shadow can have a Stalker
Liliane Dupuis—aka Alexandra Farone, aka Louisa May Alcott, aka . . . well, the list goes on from there—lives one good probation screw-up away from spending the next few years rocking an orange jumpsuit at the state pen. A disgraced former software engineer, current convenience store clerk, and part-time street-level detective, she finds her razor’s edge existence threatened by a stalker with a price for keeping quiet about her litany of violations. A price in the form of a hacking job as liable to land her in prison as it is to keep her out.
Solving this problem will involve desperate encounters with a Vietnamese gang, bargaining with an eccentric millionaire, and putting herself in the crosshairs of a violent and crooked ex-cop. It will send her in pursuit of a phantom sports car and force a mental reckoning with her own complicated past.
Coming Soon