PI Pete Fortunato, half-Italian, half-Jewish, who suffers from anger management issues and insomnia, wakes up one morning with a bad taste in his mouth. This is never a good sign. Working out of a friend's downtown real estate office, Fortunato, who spent a mysteriously short, forgettable stint as a cop in a small upstate New York town, lives from paycheck to paycheck. So, when a beautiful woman wants to hire him to find her husband, he doesn't hesitate to say yes. Within a day, Fortunato finds the husband in the apartment of his client's young, stud lover. He's been shot once in the head. Case closed. But when his client's check bounces, and a couple of Albanian gangsters show up outside his building and kidnap him, hoping he'll lead them to a large sum of money supposedly stolen by the dead man, he begins to realize there's a good chance he's been set up to take the fall for the murder and the theft of the money.

In an attempt to get himself out of a jam, Fortunato winds up on a wild ride that takes him down to Texas where he searches for his client's lover who he suspects has the money and holds the key to solving the murder.

Praise for Canary in the Coal Mine

"Salzberg has hit it out of the park. Love the writing style, and the story really draws you in. As with Salzberg's prior works, he has a knack for making his heroes real, which makes their jeopardy real, too. So, say hello to Pete Fortunato, a modern PI who thinks on his feet and has moves that read like the noir version of Midnight Run." -Tom Straw, author of the Richard Castle series (from the ABC show) and Buzz Killer

"Salzberg writes hardboiled prose from a gritty stream of conscious. Peter Fortunato is an old school PI to be reckoned with." -Sam Wiebe, award-winning author of Invisible Dead and Never Going Back

"Charles Salzberg's Canary in the Coal Mine is everything a reader wants in a great crime novel, and then some. The rat-a-tat cadence of the noir masters, seamlessly blended with the contemporary sensibilities of an author thoroughly in control of his craft. I liked this book so much I read it twice. No kidding. It's that good." -Baron R. Birtcher, multi-award winning and Los Angeles Times bestselling author

"Charles Salzberg has created a fantastic literary PI: Pete Fortunato. Rash, blunt and prone to violence, you can't help but turn the page to see what Fortunato will do next. Canary in the Coal Mine is great!" -James O. Born, New York Times bestselling author