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THE LOVE-HAIGHT CASE FILES, BOOK ONE
Seeking Supernatural Justice
BY JEAN RABE & DONALD J. BINGLE

Blurb

Thomas Brock and Evelyn Love are attorneys who crusade for the rights of OTs—Other-Than-Humans. Their clients include ghosts, gargoyles, vampires, and things that have not yet been given names. The city’s OT element is sometimes malevolent, sometimes misunderstood, and often discriminated against. Brock and Love represent them, whatever the case, whatever the species. Magic hangs heavy in San Francisco, and danger and intrigue is as thick as the fog around the Golden Gate Bridge.

Love-Haight is a comedy, locked within a mystery, hidden in a horror story… Wonderfully clever, stylish, and ghoulish. Delightfully twisted fun! —William C. Dietz, New York Times bestselling creator of The Legion of the Damned

Making the freakiest burg in the nation ten times freakier is a considerable achievement. —Glen Cook, bestselling author of The Black Company series

Publisher:  Craig Martelle, Inc   (August 23, 2021)
Releases: August 23, 2021
Genre: Paranormal Mystery Thriller
Language: English
Print Length: 396 pages
ISBN:  978-1614752752
ASIN: B098J8L6W5

THE LOVE-HAIGHT CASE FILES, BOOK ONE
Seeking Supernatural Justice
BY JEAN RABE & DONALD J. BINGLE

Excerpt

Your client is dead.”

“That does not preclude him from seeking joint custody of his two children, Your Honor.” Thomas Brock eased back from the table and prayed his nerves did not show. He’d tried cases in the Civic Center Courthouse before, but this was his first time in family court, and he’d never been before the Honorable Vernon Vaughan. The judge’s imposing bulldog like appearance unsettled him. “My client—Emanuel Holder—has lucrative employment, lives in a newly-purchased home in the city’s prestigious Sea Cliff neighborhood, and has committed no crime. Accordingly, he should be entitled to see his children. In fact, he considered seeking sole custody but decided this arrangement would be better for all concerned.”

“Your Honor, seriously?” The opposing counsel—Janet Wyndam-Smyth—pointed a manicured finger at Holder. She looked girded for war, dressed in a black suit with a pencil skirt that accentuated her thinness, bleached blond hair pulled back and slicked against the sides of her face. Her makeup was simple and severe, and her eyes were daggers aimed at the plaintiff.

Thomas glanced at his client. Holder’s expression showed a mix of hurt and surprise. It also showed that he was missing his lower lip and had a small hole in his left cheek. Death was not kind to the complexion. Holder was nearly as gray as the three-piece Armani suit he’d worn to the hearing, the maroon tie the only splash of color against a faintly pinstriped shirt. Brock had told him to dress well; he scolded himself for not dictating the colors.

“Seriously?” Wyndam-Smyth repeated. “Just look at him.”

Thomas had to admit that Holder was gaunt to the point of skeletal, the skin seeming painfully stretched over the bones of his face, revealing all the sharp angles and planes and hinting at a visage that once had been handsome. His wisps of fine hair resembled a cobweb, and black eyes that looked like wet marbles stared out from beneath his hooded brow.

“Yes, seriously,” Thomas pronounced, holding his shoulders back. “We are completely serious about this, Your Honor, Ms. Wyndam-Smyth.”

This was Thomas’s first child-custody case, and he liked the relatively informal atmosphere—no jury, no gallery of curious lookiloos, no reporters he needed to carefully posture in front of … just a discussion before a judge who had a reputation for being fair and fast. But Thomas hoped—knew—the media would eventually catch wind of this, and he looked forward to the attention that would do more good than harm for his fledgling practice, which was starting to specialize in OT law.

The “OTs,” as they were often called, tended to cluster in cities, and Thomas was well aware there were a good number of them in San Francisco, where some say true magic was born and laid heaviest in the land. OTs, or Other-Than-Humans, included creatures like his client. Holder was a ghoul, an undead creature normally associated with graveyards and considered a corpse-eater. The term OT had come from police reports and fallen into general usage: a police radio operator might say, “See the OT on the corner of Lewis and Harrel.” Journalists used it as shorthand in articles and news reports.

According to Holder, he had approached Thomas because the young lawyer recently won a wrongful employment termination case involving a succubus the ghoul knew. She had been fired because the new owner of the sports apparel company she’d worked at for a dozen years did not like OTs. The ghoul had followed the story in the news, and subsequently Thomas took on Holder’s case.

Thomas and Holder were joined at their table by Evelyn Love, an athletic looking woman with short red hair and a spray of freckles. Even in a suit, she looked more like a tennis player than a legal assistant.

About Author Jean Rabe…