Who knew collecting cheap serigraphs could cause such trouble?

A Nose for a Niedeman is the debut of Delilah Sperling and her driver and helper Donna Brechter. It runs approximately 300 pages. The print version is available for $15.99 and the ebook for $3.99 at any of the fine retailers below.

Synopsis for A Nose for a Niedeman

Dancer and aspiring actor Donna Brechter thinks that driving around Delilah Sperling is just the job she needs to be self-supporting and living away from her parents. But Mrs. Sperling isn’t just any older woman. She’s blind and a private investigator with a nose for murder. When Mrs. Sperling’s housekeeper, Glen Weir, picks up a counterfeit print, Mrs. Sperling has Donna drive her and Glen to confront the gallery owner, Josh Stein. But they find Stein dead in his stockroom, instead.

Mrs. Sperling “finds” a client and takes on the chase to find Stein’s killer and the party behind the counterfeit prints. Could it be Stein’s soon-to-be ex-wife? What about his closest competitor? Then there’s the flamboyant clothing designer. The suspect list grows. Then Donna finds herself face to face with the man of her dreams, who happens to be Mrs. Sperling’s courtesy nephew.

Donna is tongue-tied, yet does her best to help her boss. Because while Mrs. Sperling may not be able to see, she’s an expert at sniffing out a killer.

How I wrote it

A Nose for a Niedeman happened because of a part-time job I had in a store that sold art framing materials and services, along with posters, and some nice prints, or serigraphs. A serigraph is a silk-screened print made by the artist using the silk screen(s) to create the image, as opposed to making an image by, say, painting it, then making copies of it.

The store, at the time, stocked a series of serigraphs created by an artist who had died not long before, and released by the widow. My co-worker told me that he could tell when we had a counterfeit because the originals had a distinct smell. Well, that was interesting.

I’m not sure how Delilah Sperling sprang to life from that, but she did. I was, however, fascinated with the idea of a detective whose vision was completely impaired being able to sniff out the truth, and in this case, quite literally.

I’ll be honest. This is not the most rigorously researched book I have ever written, and I am usually very persnickety about things like that. But it was fun to work on.