Saraband for a Runaway

Thomas Haftmann didn’t recognize the word Saraband when the girl said it. He had to look it up: a stately court dance from the eighteenth century in slow triple time. Haftmann was a down-on-his-luck private eye with an ex-wife and debts, so he did skiptracing for a local bondsman. But then he takes an assignment to go to Florida to retrieve a runaway girl, a scholarship student named Raina Toivela. This job, I thought, will be easier than most. However, the assignment doesn’t go as smoothly as he’d hoped. That’s all too often the case for a private eye. Welcome to his world!