In Conversation with Steven Tingle

Join them to celebrate author Steven Tingle! This event is free and open to the public.

Prentiss Wells is dead. The much-respected real estate attorney gave up the ghost in a sand trap
on the sixteenth hole of a rural North Carolina golf course. The cause? According to witnesses,
an errant golf shot hit by someone who fled the scene before being identified. The death is ruled
an accident, and Davis Reed, a down-on-his-luck private detective, sees no reason to disagree.
But things get complicated when a wealthy, mystery-loving couple named Vance and Lana Roth
offer Davis five thousand dollars to prove Wells’ death was a murder and nab the killer. The
catch? Davis must partner with the Roths and include them in every step of the investigation. In
desperate need of cash, Davis accepts the deal, but he can’t help but wonder if the Roths know
something he doesn’t or if they just have more money than sense.

Meanwhile, Rusty Baker, a drug runner with the Steel Stooges biker gang, has just been released
from prison and is aiming to make good on his promise to avenge his father’s death, a self-
defense killing in which Davis played a leading role. And then there’s Elizabeth Harper, a fifty-
something, no-nonsense CPA, who, along with discovering some shady real estate deals linked to Prentiss Wells’ firm, is also stirring the butterflies in Davis’ stomach.

Along with his friend and landlord, Dale Johnson, an ornery deputy whose mood changes with
the wind, and Dale’s cousin Floppy, a hundred-pound motormouth mechanic who’s part mad
genius and part scratch you can’t itch, Davis tries to avoid Rusty’s wrath while working to
unravel a mystery that’s knotted up tighter than he could have ever imagined.

Steven Tingle is a novelist and essayist living in Greenville, South Carolina. His work has
appeared in various regional and national publications, including TOWN, which published his
monthly “Man About Town” essays for nine years. His first novel, Graveyard Fields, was
published by Crooked Lane Books in 2021. Before turning to writing, Steven was a golf course
superintendent and the general manager of the western North Carolina golf course that his
parents built in the late 1960s and operated for several decades. He left the golf business in 2008,
not by choice; his mother fired him.