Three Days Gone — William D. Carl

Mike Gone is a private investigator who delves into cases too weird for the Cincinnati Police Department. He has a tough drag queen for a secretary, a NASA scientist girlfriend, and he once staked a vampire who was sucking the local hooker population dry. After a shooting victim goes rogue zombie and disappears from the morgue, Gone and his crew are hired to find the corpse and bring it back. . . even if it's still walking. After three days, the reanimated cadaver climbs aboard a casino riverboat and wreaks havoc, bombing the boat, killing the security guards, and sending little old ladies head over bloomers into the river. The zombie collapses into a heap, but not before something glowing and green escapes from its mouth and forces its way into an unfortunate gambler. Back tracking, Gone and his crew (which now includes a tough-as-nails female cop, his secretary's soft-spoken boyfriend, a blues-singing exorcist, and his rapper grandson) discover a series of events, each separated by three days, reaching back to a singular incident with an evil spirit in a war-torn country. Now, Gone and his pals only have three days before the spirit ignites a new catastrophe, one much more devastating. Meanwhile, the members of Cincinnati's vampire union are pretty upset with how Gone handled the hooker case, and they're out for - well -- blood. Can this motley crew of two-fisted, trash-talking misfits become heroes and save the world? It's going require more than a few cocktails, a lot of wise-cracks, and one fabulous trench-coat, but with Mike Gone on the case, the chances are . . . well, at least fifty-fifty.