November 14, 1958: Harold Finn, a Homicide Detective with unconventional views on the nature of justice, has caught the case that could spell curtains for his career. Flawed, compassionate, and sarcastic, Harold butts his way through the case. An unwitting tool of the Baptiste Sect, matriarchal Provda Practitioners whose magic is far more gray than good, the detective is yanked through the story. The past snapping at his heels, a conspiracy of birds loosed upon his path. Luiza, aged thirteen, possesses a dark power that isolates her. She is solitary, fiercely in control of her emotions, feared by her classmates, and intimidating to adults. Made vulnerable by a rare, flaring compassion, Luiza reaches out to a suffering classmate, a single touch that changes everything. Maureen is cruelly abused by her mother. Her lone companion is a cat named Mr. Whiskers. His disappearance sets forth a snarling chain of events that lays waste to the life she knows, tearing a wound that opens into a world of love, terror, and hope. Fausta, a damaged child who grew into a damaging adult, is the embodiment of bad love. A malignant adversary, the journey of her unrelenting and unbalanced pursuit of vengeance against the Baptiste Sect is littered with civilian casualties. Home for a final showdown, Fausta casts her terrible influence into the lives around her. Together, they tell a tale that is bruised and blessed. At turns deliciously funny and heartbreaking, it answers the elemental question of what to do with the darkness trauma leaves behind. "Detective Harold Finn and the Disappearance of Mr. Whiskers" is a gothic tale set in a magically dark world where sparrows are not merely birds on a wire, death is an unnamed character, and grief and love are inseparable. The book is dark and brooding, like Spanish moss clinging to and obscuring the truth. There is a sense of oblique humor in the telling of this somewhat southern gothic tale, yet it defies exact locale. Nothing so banal as an actual township can be affirmed on a map. It takes place in our heads and souls where Ms. Berlin visits to exact our deepest terrors and fears. This is not a horror story awaiting a movie script. Far better than that, this tale is pulled from the very reaches of the mind and set to print to challenge every preconceived notion of life, love, hope, death, and the in-between.
