Saraband for a Runaway

Thomas Haftmann didn’t recognize the word Saraband when the girl said it. He had to look it up: “a stately court dance from the eighteenth century in “slow triple time.” Haftmann was a down-on-his-luck private eye with an ex-wife and debts, so he did skiptracing for a local bondsman. But then he takes an assignment to go to Florida to retrieve a runaway girl, a scholarship student named Raina Toivela. This job, I thought, will be easier than most. However, the assignment doesn’t go as smoothly as he’d hoped. That’s all too often the case for a private eye. Welcome to his world!

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 of Chicago as one of 6 Best Of for 2009. Special Collections, an ebook crime novel featuring a female detective and an obese academic book thief, won the Electronic Book Competition of 2014 hosted by New Rivers Press (Mankato State University). His latest novel, Perfect Killer, is due out in October 2017.