Standalone

Top 25 Mystery Novels of 2022 - The Strand Magazine

"Chambers makes the smell and harrowing vibe of the mean streets of the nation's capital come alive." - Publishers Weekly

Dickie Cornish, a Washington, DC street denizen turned unlicensed private investigator, is forced at gunpoint to track down the daughter of an ex-con. This sets off a chain of events that unleashes a war within the corrupt police force, exposes shocking conduct in child services, and unearths a secret threatening to tear the nation's capital apart. The second book in the Dickie Cornish mystery series, Standalone is a must-read for fans of S. A. Cosby, George Pelecanos, and Joe Ide.

It's been over a year since that bleak Christmas when a rich man rescued homeless, drug-addled Dickie Cornish from a steam grate, cleaned him up, and convinced him to use his street connections to track down his missing property. Now, as the summer sun bakes those same mean streets, the air thickens with crime, contagion, and corruption. Dickie struggles with sobriety, anti-psychotic meds, and counselling at the VA, yet manages to make a meagre living as a private investigator with his sidekick, "Stripe" – until an ex-con named Al-Mayadeen Thomas points a gun at Dickie's forehead and kidnaps him to a grim flophouse, a motel filled with squatters more desperate than the poor souls in the shelters.

Thomas demands that Dickie find his daughter, missing for years from the motel in a notorious cold case. The other squatters plead for him to find their vanished children as well. Thomas takes his own life to ensure Dickie's assistance. Police Chief Linda Figgis hauls Dickie in and presents him with a Faustian choice: she directs him to help her close the Thomas cold case, but only if he overlooks the other vanished and abused children. Horrified, Dickie finds himself caught in the middle of a police war, with either side closing in for the kill to keep the truth hidden.