The Long Escape

Al Colby, an American expatriate working as a private investigator in Mexico City, is contacted by an old acquaintance in Los Angeles who hands him a cold case involving a missing person. Robert Parker’s mysterious disappearance is tying up a family fortune and is enraging his abandoned wife who can’t tap the family coffers without proof of death. The case sounded routine enough, right up his alley, but the trail for the missing Mr. Parker leads Colby down a rabbit hole winding through a number of South American countries, each one a dead end. Running out of funds and clean shirts, Colby is ready to throw in the towel, but the stakes are too high and his client, Mrs. Parker, a first class bitch who only wants her money freed up by her husband’s death certificate, fuels the search with additional cash. The deeper Colby digs the more entangled he becomes in a decades old mystery of misplaced loyalties, family secrets and riches in nitrate ore. The Long Escape is the first of a three novel series featuring the rootless detective Al Colby and marks a decided departure for David Dodge, who’s previous novels followed the exploits of Whit Whitney, a buttoned-down San Franciscan accountant more into champagne and sleek cars than Colby’s tequila shots, balmy shores, and fiery Latin women. The Colby novels are enriched by authentic detail and exotic locations and set the stage for Dodge’s best known work, To Catch a Thief.