Andy Straka

This is not your mother’s cat mystery. (With apologies to all you lovers of feline noir.)

No one would ever mistake Virginia private investigator and falconer Frank Pavlicek for Ace Ventura. But when the ex homicide detective is asked to return to New York City to help find a physician/​animal rights activist’s missing feline, the stage is set for one of the most bizarre cases of Frank’s career.

Are the doctor’s accusations true? Has the eccentric developer of her luxury apartment building actually hired a hit man to kill her pet by stealing the poor creature and hunting the kitty down with a bird of prey? Turns out, the doc and some of her fellow apartment owners are embroiled in a rancorous legal dispute with the builder. Other pets are missing too and witnesses claim to have spotted a specter-like figure prowling Central Park at night carrying a giant owl.

With the help of his daughter Nicole, sometime partner Jake Toronto, and tough-nosed PI Darla Barnes, Frank soon discovers more is at stake than any of them had imagined. Chasing the mysterious falconer, they stumble upon an anonymous, half-dead child. Darla is shot and seriously wounded. To make matters worse, a reporter more interested in a bizarre story than in pursuing facts interferes along with competing camps of protestors. Not to mention Frank’s rekindled romance with erstwhile flame Marcia D’Angelo.

In the end, both the good doctor and the developer must come clean about their respective agendas, exposing a true evil that has escaped unnoticed. Overcoming such an evil will take every skill in Frank’s hunting bag, the courage of a most unlikely band of survivors . . . and a sacrifice by a heart as big as New York City and all outdoors.

Freed from prison when a new round of DNA testing casts doubt on his guilt, Quentin Price is about to confront a figure from his past who will make him an offer difficult to refuse: the chance to help solve the crime that put him behind bars. There is only one problem. What if Quentin is guilty? And what if the person he is about to meet appears the most improbable ally of all? In Record Of Wrongs (Five Star/​Gale ISBN 978-1-59414-652-7, $25.95), a thriller that crackles with a palpable sense of loss, Price, a former college security guard, balks when asked to join in a search for the real killer by the white mother of the student he was convicted of raping and murdering.

Andy Straka is also the author of the Shamus Award winning Frank Pavlicek mysteries, featuring an ex NYPD detective turned Virginia falconer and PI.

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One of the founders of the popular Crime Wave@​VABook program during the annual Virginia Festival of The Book, Andy also participates in the Crime Lab Project, a national group of crime writers and their friends and readers who are concerned about the gap between the public's beliefs about the current state of forensic science and the reality faced by the many underfunded, understaffed labs and coroners' offices throughout the country.

When I decided to branch out from my Frank Pavlicek series, I knew I wanted to focus on a unique kind of story. I began writing Record Of Wrongs more than five years ago after reading a number of DNA exoneration stories in the press. As a storyteller, I couldn't help but start thinking “what if?”, and the plot began to take shape from there. That the narrative is set in upstate New York also makes it special to me since I grew up less than fifty miles from Auburn prison and the Binghamton area where most of the action in Record Of Wrongs takes place.

DNA exoneration is an intriguing springboard for a book. John Grisham, for example, recently published The Innocent Man, an absorbing non-fiction account of a real case that took place in Oklahoma. Controversy surrounds DNA exonerations and the issue of wrongful incarcerations, including questions of race and the death penalty, etc. Yet the fact remains that far more often than not DNA testing confirms rather than overturns convictions. My objective in writing Record Of Wrongs was not to advocate for any particular point of view, but merely to let the characters tell their story and allow you, the reader, to form your own judgments. In that regard at least, I hope the book is a success.

Thank you for adding it to your reading list.

Andy