Big Cult Energy

Jack Friday's wickedly funny and irrepressible PI Peter Key returns with two new baffling cases.

After surviving a brush with death, Peter Key is debating if he wants to stay in the detective game. On the one hand, his last case left him with a house in Austin, a loyal dog and enough money to coast for ages. On the other, his new home is a wreck, and there’s no better cure for wealth than foundation repairs.

Luckily for Peter, two lucrative cases fall into his lap within twenty-four hours. First, a pair of good-looking young people arrive with a carful of packages addressed to a man they’ve never heard of. The packages have been arriving at their home for days with no explanation, which would be weird enough. Now, however, menacing strangers have started turning up at their doorstep looking for this same mystery man. These strangers wear robes, sandals, and big cult energy.

The next morning, as Peter returns to work for his former mentor—the unflappable PI Grady Bernaisse—he’s handed a second case. A curmudgeonly old woman from the deep country arrives with a surreal story about how a box of her dead grandson’s belongings were stolen from her while she was trapped in the floor of her house. Peter can’t shake the feeling there’s something the woman isn’t telling him, but he also can’t pass up the reward she’s promising.

As these strange investigations unfold, Peter’s search for answers will take him from a tech billionaire’s mansion to the state penitentiary, from a tiny town with some rotten secrets to a remote compound with some dangerous fauna. It will introduce him to a con artist and an honest-to-God cowboy, a pair of very hungry mountain lions and the devoted followers of Lizard-Jesus. Strangest of all, Peter will soon come to suspect that these two cases might not be so separate after all.