Linda Barnes: The Snake Tattoo (USA 2015)

From the Publisher:
Hailed by Sue Grafton as "a true original," ex-cop turned private eye Carlotta Carlyle risks her neck in Boston's Combat Zone for two very different clients

Six-foot-tall, redheaded ex-cop and Boston-based private eye Carlotta Carlyle is "the genuine article: a straightforward, funny, thoroughly American mystery heroine" (New York Post).

Carlotta Carlyle is halfway through a pizza when her former boss, Lieutenant Mooney of the Boston Police, shows up at her door needing help even more than Carlotta needs a case. In a Combat Zone bar, Mooney got into a scrap with a stranger over a woman. Now the stranger is comatose, the woman has vanished, and Mooney has been suspended. He wants Carlotta to find the blond hooker with a snake tattoo who witnessed the brawl, and who can exonerate him.

Doing surveillance in the Zone, Carlotta gets a second case. A ritzy prep school kid with a bloody lip hires her to find his missing girlfriend. Drawn into two different yet equally dangerous worlds where dead bodies are showing up, Carlotta has only two weeks to save the most honest cop in Boston from going to jail, and to find a girl whose privileged parents don't seem to care that she's run away.

The Snake Tattoo was named an outstanding book of the year by the London Times.

The Snake Tattoo is the 2nd book in the Carlotta Carlyle Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

Linda Barnes: The Snake Tattoo. A Carlotta Carlyle Mystery. Open Road Media, ISBN: 9781504014274 (July, 2015), eBook, 1.19 MB (ca. 286 p.), $7.99.

Linda Barnes: The Snake Tattoo (USA 2004)

From the Publisher:
Carlotta Carlyle, ex-cop, struggling private eye, and 6'1" of long tall redhead, takes any case that walks through the door. This time the door opens twice. First in is her old partner, Lieutenant Mooney of the Boston police, unfairly charged with brutality, suspended, and desperate. The witness who can clear him is a hooker with a snake tattoo...and she's vanished.

The second client is a teenager with a missing wallet and a split lip. He's been roughed up on the Boston streets while searching for his runaway girlfriend. He's too young to be a client, and Carlotta should have turned him down. Shoulda, woulda, coulda... didn't.

Both investigation send Carlotta into Boston's Combat Zone and the dark alleys of the human heart. Hookers don't disappear and kids don't take off with good reason. Now Carlotta is coming face to face with the evil that men do, and what is she going to do about it? Tackle it head on...

Linda Barnes: The Snake Tattoo. A Carlotta Carlyle Mystery. St. Martin's Minotaur, ISBN: 0312993552 (Febuary, 2004), 320 p., $6.99.