One, Two Three Strikes You're Dead: A Brad Powers Mystery (1)

Brad Powers, retired Army intelligence investigator, just wanted to be a police detective in a quiet town. Though denied the job, he solves the community's 20-year-old murder mystery anyway.

Soon after the police chief rejects his work application, Powers begins a slow inadvertent stumble into the intertwined lives of two women: Carlene, a predator, and Myra, her prey. Powers befriends Myra who's unhappily married to a marathon philanderer. He rescues her from an attempted kidnapping. Then Myra's jailed assailant makes bail and is killed in exactly the same way he father was murdered 20 years earlier.

Investigating, Powers is surprised to learn Myra is wealthy and even more surprised to stumble upon some very tangled relationships. Myra's husband manages the industrial firm which Myra's murdered father owned years before. The widowed father's murder occurred after he wed his own teenage secretary, Carlene, the predator with whom Myra's hubby now is in a permanent tryst. As Powers unravels the mystery's disjointed strands, he discovers Carlene and Myra's husband go way back to the housing projects of Philadelphia.

Then a bewildered Myra tells Powers that her endowment trust seems to have far less money than it ought. As if that weren't enough, Powers is injured in an attempt on his own life. But though briefly hospitalized, he draws upon his resources to uncover fraud, theft and police corruption and the reason for the murder which started it all.