Two Graves Dug

A Phil Rodriquez Mystery, #1

Here  is a New York City of narrow village streets and tenements filled with people whose lives are anything but narrow--all kinds and classes and ages of people--people who will, on occasion, need a Private Investigator to...handle things. Here is the Lower East Side and here is native son Phil Rodriquez, PI, a first generation Nuyorican. In Two Graves Dug, Phil is hired to find out who's hurting women in his 'hood: Young ones--little girls being victimized by a serial rapist--and a grown-up woman being harrassed by somebody who doesn't want her back in the old neighborhood she left a lifetime ago. Then rape turns to murder, harrassment turns into terrorism, and somebody is digging up old, ugly secrets from the past. It's enough to make Phil wonder if there's really anything he can do. Then he finds out the cops had info that could have prevented a little girl's rape and murder and a furious Phil puts his license on the line to make it right. Along the way he forms a surprising alliance with a low-level bigoted Mafioso everybody in the neighborhood hates, and he comes to believe that his business partner and best friend, Yolanda Aguierre, is correct in her belief that secrets and lies are at the root of the problems wreaking havoc in their little village on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Phil Rodriquez is a different kind of PI: He can be tough when he must. He's not the kind of guy who'll start a fight--but he's also never run from one. And he's not afraid or ashamed to care--and if that means sometimes wearing his heart on his sleeve...well, so be it.