Finding Lexi Divine

A Dark Crime Thriller About Vengeance, Faith, and the Line Between Justice and Sin

Charlie Doyle is no saint. A suspended police detective with a complicated Catholic conscience, a high-priced escort for a girlfriend, and little patience for scumbags, he knows better than most how dirty the city can get. But when he’s hired to find a missing stripper, the case pulls him into something far more dangerous than a routine disappearance.

What begins as a search for Lexi Divine leads Doyle toward a powerful criminal operation, a trail of bodies, and a woman whose need for revenge makes his own grudges look small. As violence closes in and old scores come due, Doyle finds himself caught between justice and vengeance in a city where guilt is everywhere and some angels carry guns.

Tom Towslee’s Finding Lexi Divine is a gritty, dark crime novel about revenge, corruption, faith, and the brutal consequences of crossing the wrong people.

Read Finding Lexi Divine today.

Excerpt from the book

The sweet science of boxing had turned his world sour.

Even at his peak, he was little more than a dweller on the threshold of a brutal sport where those on the outside of the ring were just as ruthless as those on the inside. A sport that showed no mercy, that chewed up wannabe contenders and spit them out like bloody mouthpieces. He spent his career as a regular on undercards, fighting those on the way up and others, like him, on the way down.

Promoters denied him the chance to realize his dream of standing across the ring from a young Cassius Clay, trading jabs with Sonny Liston or ducking right hooks from Floyd Patterson. They told him the slums were filled with light-heavyweight champions looking to move up in class for a chance at the real money. Wait your turn, they said. Only his turn never came.

Instead, he sold his soul to a gambling ring for short money and a piece of his own inaction. Remember, they told him, take the dive in the third round, not the second or the fourth. He did as he was told, and two fights later the boxing commission stepped in. The gamblers paid a fine. He lost his license and never fought again.

Fifteen years in the ring had left him punch-drunk, disfigured, and close to broke. He went from local celebrity to comic relief, moving from bar to bar, posing for pictures in exchange for drinks until no one remembered him anymore.

Each of the countless punches to the head came like little concussions that added up to big ones. His brain banged around inside his skull, things came unplugged, memories disappeared, words slurred, ears rang. Confusion, dizziness, headaches. The brain bleeds. Strokes inevitable. The odds of doing anything smart got longer and longer. A head full of imaginary voices with advice on how to dress, what to eat, and where to buy socks. Death by a thousand blows.

All that explained why Padraig “Bronco” Moran was in a dingy room in a squalid hotel holding a gun to the head of an underage hooker.

Bronco’s eyes were wide and unblinking, the rest of his face a mass of scars and confusion. A man with no idea what he was doing or why. A lost and forgotten soul with a sketchy past and no future. I knew he carried a wrinkled and faded picture in his wallet of the marquee at Madison Square Garden. His name was right below the main event: Floyd Patterson versus Ingemar Johansson. It was a high point in a life of low blows, the worst ones self-inflicted.

That Bronco never got his shot was nobody’s fault but his own. We now had that in common, the kind of mutual misery shared over gin gimlets in dark bars where bartenders polished glasses and bored divorcees in miniskirts sat at the corner tables sipping cheap wine and flashing too much thigh.