The year is 1970. The location is Redwood City, an old town about twenty miles from the bustling edges of San Francisco.
Rex Nickels is no stranger to strangeness; being a private eye introduces you to some pretty quirky circumstances. But the business with the body in the cemetery? Well, that became a tangled mess fairly quickly.
When Hulda Stein-Franken asks Rex to find out who killed her son before the police do, he takes the case.
The first cryptic clue: "If you see k..." scrawled across the clear raincoat in which the killer dressed the otherwise naked corpse. This was certainly going to be a humdinger of an investigation-one for the books.
Soon, Rex finds himself breathing the rarified air of the thoroughbred breeding world, sniffing around stables to uncover just what is going on behind the racetracks, and stumbling into his old flame Kay Dale, who also happens to have a secret connection to the dead man.
Light on gruesome details and heavy on humor and great characters, What the Owl Saw is a fun read, full of perfectly timed plot twists that keep you guessing until the very end. And don't worry-the second Rex Nickels mystery is being penned as we speak.
About the Author: An architect and a city planner walked into a bar. The bartender said, "We don't serve your kind-only writers and birds here."
The two old friends, both seventy something, said in unison, "We know how to write," and they sat down at the bar and began to collaborate on a detective novel. Art the architect lived in Dallas, Texas, and Ed the planner lived in Oakland, California, but no problem, they could exchange their jottings via e-mail.
And so over the next five years, chapters multiplied and flew back and forth through cyberspace, until one day, from the end of the bar, an Owl said, "Enough already, let me tell what really happened."
Besides age, long friendship, and longterm marriages, Arthur Rogers and Edward Phillips have something else in common: writing. But while Rogers has penned poetry, short stories, and plays, Phillips has crafted plan documents, as well as policy positions and regulations.
Rogers and Phillips are currently writing the second Rex Nickels mystery.
