Red Sockets

Kraus could feel the blood drain from his face. Only his police training and combat experience kept him from throwing up. He looked at the covered body, then back at Laveroni.

"Go ahead," Laveroni said. "We've been here since four-thirty. Got all the preliminaries."

Los Angeles - 1956

Former LAPD policeman, Gordon "Gordy" Kraus, has been a private detective since coming home to Los Angeles after a tough war. After years of patrolling the streets of Los Angeles, then two years as a military policeman in the grimness of post-war Berlin, he swore never to involve himself in another homicide investigation.

A corpse turning up in an East L.A. alleyway forces Kraus to break his oath. The LAPD isn't interested in investigating the murder. Kraus has a personal connection to the victim. He enlists the aid of a cagey female con artist he'd been pursuing and together they begin their hunt for the killer.

Their search leads them to illegal gambling dens, ruthless mobsters, seedy pool halls, desperate blackmail targets and a mysterious Los Feliz mansion. Every new discovery seems to point to a new type of company: an "electronics distributor".

Transistors. Diodes. Potentiometers. Capacitors. Resistors. Building blocks for an emerging, transistorized world. Quick deliveries. Quicker money. Loads of it. But money can never come quickly enough or in great enough amounts for some people.

Could the birth of a new industry have led to the death of an ex-cop?

Greed and murder are as old as prehistoric cave paintings. Kraus learns they're no less deadly in a world of modern technology.