FARMINGTON — DDG Booksellers, 193 Broadway, will host an author presentation and book signing of the book “The Solo Act” by Richard Cass at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 20. “The Solo Act” is published by Farmington’s Encircle Press.

In this amateur sleuth mystery, Elder Darrow uses the last of the money from the trust fund his mother left him to buy the Esposito, a bucket-of-blood bar in Boston, hoping to turn it into a jazz nightspot. Though he knows that working in a bar is going to test his sobriety, he’s relying on the support of his ex-lover, a jazz singer named Alison Somers.

The two of them split when Alison moved to New York to further her career but before she left, the two of them made a pact: he’ll stay off the booze if she keeps taking her antidepressants, which keep her from another suicide attempt. Then one day Elder hears that Alison has killed herself by diving out her apartment window. With his sobriety threatened, he follows an instinct that says she wouldn’t have quit taking her meds, or killed herself, without talking to him first.

Along the way, Elder encounters a beautiful collector of jazz memorabilia, a Native American gangster with aspirations to management, and a bomb-throwing piano player, as well as the usual stresses and strains of running a bar. But with the reluctant help of his friend Dan Burton, a homicide cop, Elder investigates and exposes the conspiracy of local thugs, corrupt physicians, and shipments of pharmaceuticals of questionable quality, proving that Alison was murdered and who was responsible. 

Cass is the author of Solo Act, the first volume in the Elder Darrow series. “In Solo Time” is the prequel to that book, the origin story for Elder and his friend, Boston Homicide detective Dan Burton. Cass’s short fiction has won prizes from magazines like Redbook, Writers’ Digest, and Playboy. His first collection of stories was called “Gleam of Bone.”

He is active with the Maine Crime Writers group, which blogs at Maine Crime Writers and serves on the board of Mystery Writers of America’s New England chapter. He lives in Cape Elizabeth, Maine with his wife Anne and a Maine Coon cat named Tinker, where he writes full time.

Richard Cass