Nocturne for Madness

“Grim and gritty, Robb White’s Haftmann series will curl the hairs on your neck. You’ll need a stiff drink after living inside Haftmann’s head chapter after chapter. The private eye and the killer are bookends for psychosis.”
- H.L. Osterman, Short Changed

Here we encounter the controlled madness of two men, one an ex-cop, the other a killer of women. Thomas Haftmann, formerly of Cleveland Homicide, is recently divorced and working as a private investigator in the resort town of Jefferson-on-the-Lake. Barely surviving financially, and haunted by his own twin demons of gambling and alcohol, Haftmann gets swept up in the statewide manhunt for a deranged misfit who meets women on swingers’ Internet sites and kills them. Ohio police keep finding headless bodies displayed in bizarre poses. Sensationalized in the tabloid press as the “Jack-in-the-Box Killer,” Lonnie Dale Nelson carries with him a voice inside his head (his “angel) that grows stronger as his madness intensifies over the course of the year-long manhunt. But worse, Haftmann’s own mental instability is accelerating as the trail leading to Nelson grows warmer.

Robb White lives in Northeastern Ohio close to the house where he grew up. Many of his crime stories feature private investigator Thomas Haftmann, the protagonist of two earlier novels: Haftmann’s Rules (2011) and Saraband for a Runaway (2013). A third novel, When You Run with Wolves, was published in 2015. He has a collection of short stories titled Out of Breath and Other Stories (2013) that mixes mainstream and crime fiction. Until he retired from college teaching this year, White wrote book reviews and conducted interviews for the print magazine Boxing World. His short story “Frotteur in the Dark” was selected by the editors of 10,000 Tons of Black Ink as one of 6 Best Of for 2009.