Obsession

Sharon Hayes is back. So is the voice in her head. You know, the one who helps her solve crimes. After her first - and last - major case as a private detective, Sharon, or "Styx" as her family and friends know her, has rejoined the Bronx Central Precinct Homicide Squad. She has a new partner, and roommate. It's the exotic, beautiful, distracting, 6'8," 154 lbs. Detective Nikki Noble. They are assigned their first case together: the murder of a high-end prostitute in a luxury apartment on The Concourse. That, of course, is The Grand Concourse, a major and historic boulevard which runs the distance from Fordham Road to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. The murder victim is one Annette Antoninni. Her age is listed as 35. She has been posed at the crime scene, elegantly coiffed and clothed, with only the knife protruding from her chest to spoil the scene. One of the detectives' first discoveries is that this lady is clean: she has no record. So why has she been labelled a prostitute? The answer to that question unlocks a door to many more questions. Puzzles. Conundra. That's the plural of conundrum, isn't it? So Antoninni isn't her real name. Thirty-five isn't her real age. And, although the knife is the proximate cause of death, she is found to be riddled with cancer. That's another problem. The year is 2057. People don't die of cancer any more. Sharon Hayes and Nikki Noble begin the long trek to unravelling the mysteries surrounding not just Annette Antoninni's death - but also her long and sordid life. So she is really sixty-or-seventy-something. So are a mystery group of "old dudes" who meet with her weekly at a bar that is Sharon's home away from home: The Yankee Doodle. The unravelling of Annette Antoninni's life takes the detectives back to Nome, Alaska, where one Angela Tucci has just been crowned as "Miss Nome." The beautiful young Angie Tucci then leaves for Fairbanks, Seattle, and eventually Los Angeles, where she meets and befriends Joseph DeSantos. That's right. Joseph DeSantos, AKA "The Napa Knifer." He is caught and incarcerated. He dies just days before his scheduled execution. So why then are his prints and semen all over the crime scene in the Bronx apartment? DeSantos had accomplices back in the 2000's when his murder sprees started. Although DeSantos and his cohorts have aged chronologically by fifty years, they seem to have physically aged only a decade. How is this possible? Maybe the three "old dudes" in The Yankee Doodle aren't DeSantos, Sanders, and Chavez after all.... If not, then who are they? Why do they meeti Antoninni weekly and pay court to her? And how is it that they stop coming to the bar when Antoninni is murdered? And one more tickler: Sharon Hayes's dad is back. Yeap, DeWayne NMI Doyle, supposedly locked in a persistent vegetative state in the NY State Hospital for the Criminally Insane returns in this tale, too. What the hell is this maniac up to this time? Join us and find out!