The name’s Marlon Morrison–Detective Marlon Morrison to you– and you may have heard the stories about me around here in the Personal Crimes Unit. Some of it, maybe, is true: I am pretty tired of this job and I am looking forward to uneventfully riding out my final months before retirement. But some of the other rumors about me, well, are just a bad rap. I don’t see myself as a chronic complainer, nor all that difficult to get along with, and I don’t really think I’m the kind of guy who tries to shirk off his load on his colleagues. Let’s just say I don’t believe in wasted time or effort.

“Personal Crimes” sounds like a pretty impressive workplace, I have to say. Some bureaucrat thought it up to give us some gravitas, I suppose. We used to be called Robbery-Homicide and then Special Crimes, and as far as I can tell, through all that, nothing else has changed in terms of our job. We get served up the worst of the worst, and lots of it. A man in my position can get tired pretty fast. A typical day here might start with a trip to the scene of some new ingeniously horrific crime, but largely consists of a lot of scut work back and forth across the city, knocking on doors, following up leads, interviewing the reluctant and unhelpful. It doesn’t end when we return to the unit to expend more energy, coaxing overworked lab techs for results, navigating the constant demands of our Lieutenant, and wrestling with the reams of paperwork demanded by the prosecutors who will be taking over the cases we clear. It’s alternately trauma followed by tedium, and I’m not sure which wears me out more.

Don’t let on that I said so, but I have to give a lot of respect to the rest of the detectives in the squad: Frank Vandegraf, Athena Pardo, Dan Lee, Leon Simpkins, Art Dowdy. They’re tough, smart, resilient and dedicated. They need to be. Maybe the toughest of the bunch is Jilly Garvey, the laser-focused redhead that Frank calls the heart, soul and moral center of our unit. They consistently do impressive work on some formidable cases. It’s not easy having to be compared to that group of overachievers every day, let me tell you.

The joke around here may be that I spend my day avoiding work, but they all had to give me grudging credit recently. A case was so outrageous and improbable– kidnapping, mayhem, multiple murders– that it just finally got to me. I found myself giving it my best effort, even putting in overtime, to clear it, and clear it I did. Sometimes people have a way of surprising you– even me.

You can find out all about that interesting turn of events in the new Personal Crimes entry, “Find the Money.”

Find The Money, A Personal Crimes Mystery, Vol. #5
Genre: Police Procedural Mystery
Release: February 2024
Format: Print
Purchase Link

The mysterious Vanessa has vanished, and that spells trouble all around. It’s worth a million dollars in cash to a vicious drug lord to get her back, but the ransom, tucked away in a trash bag, has disappeared as well, setting brutal gangsters and hapless kidnappers on a scramble to find the money–and to stay alive.

Meanwhile, Detective Marlon Morrison’s plans to peacefully ride out his final year-and-a-half before retirement have been complicated by a disturbing succession of murder victims. He’s finding himself hauled into a case that grows stranger and more perilous by the hour.

Everybody’s looking for something, nothing is going as planned, and something’s got to give.

Meet the author
Tony Gleeson, an enthusiastic fan of jazz and classic crime fiction, is a writer, illustrator and graphic designer. He resides in Los Angeles with his wife, Annie, and their cats, Django and Mingus. His Personal Crimes procedural series, ten of which have now been published in the UK and US, take place in an unnamed city, the identity of which the reader is cordially invited to puzzle out. The most recent release is “Find the Money,” published by Wildside Press.