The Eight-Day Clock

"The Eight-Day Clock" is a dryly sardonic, hard-boiled, pulp-style detective novel about a team of gay male gumshoes who find themselves entangled in the dirty identity politics of central Florida in 1996.

The story begins at the home of June and Dick Whitlock, a new-money monstrosity in the affluent suburbs of Hillsborough County. Dick is an incumbent Republican state senator, a Mormon whose wealth and career rests precariously on the family's Christian-market media and retail empire, now powered largely by the iron-willed ambition of his wife.

Recently, they've received an envelope containing compromising photographs of their young son, Tony, along with a note demanding $750,000. With Dick's reelection campaign in its final stretch, they hire private investigator Jimmy Campaglia to find the blackmailer before any damage is done to the family's reputation.

But when the usually nonchalant Jimmy is turned on by the sexy photos, he becomes more than dispassionately interested in the case after getting to know Tony-in the biblical sense. Jimmy, with his what-the-hell attitude and his marijuana-steeped partner, Bailey, encounter an endless stream of pious, uptight, inept, and buffoonish characters as they wade neck-deep into the oozing fount of hypocrisy at the center of the Whitlock conservative media and political empire.