How well do we ever know anyone? Even someone we might be falling in love with…

On a rainy October morning, Mallory Petersen, private detective and martial artist, discovers the corpse of her boyfriend, Bobby Furillo, in front of her office in Des Moines, Iowa.

Bucking police authority and continually attacked by unknown adversaries, Mallory discovers Bobby’s devastating secrets. Each new revelation puts Mallory in deeper peril from powerful and dangerous people, but she won’t stop until she learns the truth.

Mallory Petersen isn’t your stereotypical private investigator. She’s a woman, blonde, and stands six feet tall. Besides following cheating spouses, she owns a martial arts school where she teaches taekwondo (she’s a fourth-degree black belt) to young students. And instead of operating in glamorous Los Angeles or chic New York, her home base is in the smallish Midwestern city of Des Moines, Iowa.

But the capital of rural Iowa has big-city crime, and when Mallory finds her boyfriend, Bobby Furillo, murdered in her office parking lot, she knows (and we do, too) that this is a case she must solve.

Mallory soon learns some unsavory things about Bobby. He’s a bottom-feeder with a wife. And another girlfriend. Oh, and he deals drugs on a large scale, too. Disillusioned though she may be, our intrepid P.I. can’t have dead bodies show up in her parking lot without digging to find out who is responsible and why.

Like any good private investigator, Mallory has contacts in the Des Moines police force, the closest being homicide detective Harry Reznik. Reznik, of course, wants nothing to do with an outsider poking her nose into a police investigation, but as this case unfolds, he finds he has little choice. Solving this murder leads Mallory and the police into a vortex of secrets, violence, and corruption.

At its core, Alpha is an intricate crime story that drags Mallory down a road strewn with land mines. She takes her lumps, often literally, as she probes into Bobby’s life and works to uncover his killers. Author Stephen L. Brayton salts the book with occasional humorous elements, à la Carl Hiaasen, adding to the enjoyment of an already entertaining tale.

My only serious problem with Alpha is how it’s told in flashbacks. On an evening when they’re escaping a snowstorm by a cozy fireside, Mallory’s current boyfriend, Quad Cities cop Lawrence Cameron, asks her to tell him about one of her toughest cases. Naturally, that case is Bobby Furillo’s murder. The narrative bounces between the snug couple and the by-now complete homicide case. I didn’t care for the storyline switching back and forth between the present and the recent past.

Another issue is the ending of the book itself. Once the investigation is over, Mallory has some level of post-traumatic stress disorder from the Furillo case. But the way Lawrence “cures” her with a few common-sense words is pure deus ex machina. Real life is never that simple. Considering the book overall, these complaints amount to minor quibbles. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Alpha to any fan of mysteries and police procedurals.

Stephen L. Brayton is a Sixth Degree Black Belt in the American Taekwondo Association and a Marketing Associate for a software company.

He began writing as a child; his first short story concerned a true incident about his reactions to discipline. During high school, he wrote for the school newspaper and was a photographer for the yearbook. For a Mass Media class, he wrote and edited a video project.

In college, he began a personal journal for a writing class; said journal is ongoing. He was also a reporter for the college newspaper.

During his early twenties, while working for a Kewanee, Illinois radio station, he wrote a fantasy-based story and a trilogy for a comic book.

Alpha, the first of his Mallory Petersen action mystery series will be released in July ‘23.

He is the editor and contributing author of The Peace Tree Mystery, a story set in the Knoxville, Iowa/Lake Red Rock area.

He has also been published in numerous anthologies of fiction, poems in Lyrical Iowa 2018-2022, and an article in the Nov/Dec ‘23 issue of Plant Engineering.