The Boy Who Was Buried This Morning (Dave Brandstetter 11)

When a paintball player gets hit with a real bullet, Dave Brandstetter catches the case.Insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter has spent the last few years drifting in and out of retirement. For the sake of his boyfriend, Cecil, he has attempted to forgo dangerous jobs. But when a close friend’s death sends Dave into a depressive funk, Cecil recognizes that work is the only cure. During a high-stakes paintball game, a hardcore supremacist gets hit by a very real bullet. Although the police claim the death was accidental - nothing but a stray round from a nearby hunting preserve - Dave knows that a man this hated seldom dies by chance. His investigation takes him into the strange world of make-believe war - a grown-up version of cowboys and Indians whose players sometimes have trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality. If Dave isn’t careful, he’ll find himself stained with something more permanent than paint. While investigating a suicide, Dave Brandstetter discovers a dead reporter's final scoop. Journalist Adam Streeter covered some of the most dangerous stories of the last quarter century, ranging from Cambodia to Siberia and anywhere troubled in between. Fearless, dashing, and more than a little resourceful, Streeter was renowned as much for his virtuosic writing as the shocking reality of what he uncovered along the way. Why would someone who lived so purposefully and with such demonstrable bravery turn a pistol on himself? Insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter has seen enough suicides to know this isn't one. Suspecting treachery, he digs into Adam's last story — an unpublished investigation into the whereabouts of a vanished South American strongman, called El Carnicero, the Butcher — and finds that Adam's death shows every hallmark of his bloody style. Dave quickly realized that some very powerful people would like him to drop the case. Dave's own lover, Cecil, would like to see him take it easy for once. But Cecil knows Brandstetter is not so unlike the man whose death he's investigating. The truth, to someone like Brandstetter or Streeter, is worth the ultimate price. As he attempts to finish Adam's story and get to the bottom of the journalist's death, Dave will find more than a few people willing to make him pay it.