I could be the poster boy for the American Dream. I’m an orphan in my thirties, live in an apartment above my Grandpops garage, and am dating a woman who I believe is using me just for the sex. A slightly varied version of the typical American Dream of a home with a white picket fence, a loving wife, and 2.2 children. I don’t even have a dog. My name is Clay Wolfe.

My parents died in a car crash when I was eight and I was raised by Grandpops. I do have a best friend that I met the year my parents died. Weston Beck. Westy and I were inseparable as we grew up in Port Essex, Maine, a coastal town of mixed fisherman and incredible wealthy people from away.

We did everything together and always had each other’s back, no matter what. I was more inclined toward academics, whereas all he ever wanted was to be a fisherman. Westy was not somebody to be messed with, and he’d pulled me out of quite a few scrapes by cracking heads. I was the quarterback and he was the running back on the state football championship team our senior year.

That is where our paths diverged. I went to college for the purpose of becoming a homicide detective. Westy went off to become a SEAL. I ended up solving murders in Boston. He traveled to places in the Middle East and did things he never talks about. It would be fair to say that we drifted apart.

Then Grandpops took a fall, and I realized he wasn’t getting any younger, and besides, I’d already grown jaded with arresting the poor while the rich walked free. I returned to Port Essex to open a PI firm. Westy was back in town after eight years as a SEAL, returning to his fishing roots, having gotten married and had a boy. He was well on his way to the typical American Dream.

For the past year, things have gone smoothly. I investigate insurance fraud and the like with the occasional bodyguard duties for people that don’t really need protection. I haven’t had my gun out in all that time, and I like that. I meet Westy a couple times a week for drinks, at the Pelican Perch in warm weather, down to the Seal Bar when it’s cold. My policewoman friend calls me at least three times a week for sex.

I have a receptionist with a tattoo that say’s Real People on her wrist. I hired her even though knowing she’d killed her husband. She is tall, slender, with dark hair and skin, and has a sparkling wit. I think about her a lot.

My other friends seem to be a retired clam digger of about seventy who may or may not have been part of the IRA before fleeing Ireland for Maine some fifty years ago and a queer newspaper reporter who interviewed me after the state football championship game for her newspaper some years back.

The beauty of the American Dream is that it is your dream. It can be what you want, not what you’re told it’s supposed to be. Corporate America can’t impose upon you their particular conceived notion of what your dream should be. It is yours. And I was happy. Or at least not miserable.

And then, one day, this woman came into my office to hire me. She walked like one of those surfbirds with the long legs that took quick jerky steps as it wades along the waves crashing on shore. She wore a tube top that clung to her waif-thin body like Saran Wrap, even if it was bright orange. She was either in her sixties or a very rough forties. I was betting on the latter.

Crystal Landry said she wanted me to find the person who supplied the drugs that killed her grandbaby.

I have a feeling that my day is about to change. That my life is about to change. But isn’t that what the American Dream is all about? Change?

Wolfe Trap, A Clay Wolfe / Port Essex Mystery #1
Genre: Traditional
Release: June 2021
Purchase Link

Clay Wolfe is a former Boston homicide detective who has left the police department to return home to Maine to care for his elderly grandfather and open a private detective agency. Haunted by being orphaned at an early age, and jaded by the corruption of the big city, Clay is happy to hit pause and investigate minor crimes. When he is hired to find out who sold the drugs that killed a six-month-old baby girl, he has no idea of the evil that he is going to uncover in the underbelly of his hometown. Wolfe Trap is a thrilling ride set in a small Maine town with rich characters and shocking plot twists that will keep the reader rapt until the final pages.

About the Author
Matt Cost is the author of the Mainely Mystery series. The first book, Mainely Power, was selected as the Maine Humanities Council fiction book of 2020. This was followed by Mainely Fear and Mainely Money. Wolfe Trap is the first in the Clay Wolfe Port Essex Trap series. It will be followed by Mind Trap in October of 2021 and Mouse Trap in January of 2022.

Over the years, Cost has owned a video store, a mystery bookstore, and a gym. He has also taught history and coached just about every sport imaginable. Cost lives in Brunswick, Maine, with his wife, Harper. There are four grown children: Brittany, Pearson, Miranda, and Ryan. A chocolate Lab and a basset hound round out the mix. He now spends his days at the computer, writing.

All comments are welcomed.