Dead Certain: Book Three in the Matt Jagger, P.I. Triliogy, "Three Times Dead"
Ross, Gordon R.
Synopsis "Dead Certain: Book Three in the Matt Jagger, P.I. Triliogy, "Three Times Dead""
This is the third edition of Book 3 in the Matt Jagger, Private Detective series, "Three Times Dead." In earlier stories, Jagger, the badly wounded victim of corrupt officers from his own police unit, has been forced to flee early 1930's Los Angeles. With the help of another former LA police friend, now a Santa Barbara city police detective sergeant, Matt has set up a private investigations business in that city. Pressures of the job prove too much for his wife, who has left him, and he soon finds himself solving the mob-murders of his ex and others in his shrinking circle of friends. His success has resulted in interfering with some of the Mafia's bigger plans, and the pressure from the Southern California Mafia and crooked LA cops to get rid of Matt Jagger becomes never ending. In this final story of the series, when Jagger's office is blown up, his business destroyed, his secretary badly is hurt, and his landlord's restaurant business is burned to the ground by a mob-directed bombing carried out by a villainous Los Angeles police bomb squad captain, he knows he must fight back...going after those orchestrating all the recent deaths and mayhem. Matt must find his targets, now hiding in plain sight on a small freighter servicing the east coast ports along Central America's shoreline, while they aid and supply the growing Axis pre-war military presence in the region. Jagger is joined in his quest for vengeance by the small band of survivors who have suffered along with him. They head south after the masters of the cargo vessel, once the gambling ship run by the mob off the Santa Barbara...the ship on which Matt's ex-wife was murdered. The small boat carrying Jagger's little band of four is shipwrecked along the primitive Nicaraguan shore in one of the many storms that wrack the area. Slamming into an impenetrable wall of mangroves, Matt's band of two men and two women must battle the jungle, their targets and new Nazi allies, who could be expecting them...if the unlikely quartet has survived the crash and its aftermath...far from any friendly help. Jagger's plans for retribution may backfire there in a strange world where nature and the villains seem to hold all the cards!
