St. Louis, MO – July 7, 2017.
In Dean Klinkenberg’s compelling new novel, Double-Dealing in Dubuque, writer Frank Dodge gets a simple assignment that quickly turns complicated when a fire races through the Dubuque Convention Center, killing two people. Dodge suspects the city’s ambitious mayor of covering up the cause of the fire, so he swears to investigate until he discovers what really caused the tragedy.
Dodge was sent to Dubuque by a New York-based magazine to write about the growing appetite for craft food in the Midwest, an assignment that he believes is more than a little condescending.
“Dodge has strong opinions about how food is marketed and not much patience when it comes to dealing with coastal perceptions of life in the Midwest,” author Klinkenberg said, “but he needs the money, so he’ll play along, at least until the fire sends him in an entirely different direction.”
Before the fire breaks out, a rival writer shows up in town; Dodge worries that she’ll try to steal the story from him, like she has before. As Dodge tries to keep his rival at bay, his investigation lands him in the middle of a bitter dispute between an ice cream maker from Dubuque, Iowa, and a chocolatier from Galena, Illinois.
“I wanted to play around with rivalries in this book,” Klinkenberg said, “to set up a couple of intense feuds and see where it took me. As I wrote the story, I realized that the rivals in Double-Dealing just didn’t know how to dial back their feuds, that every action was going to escalate the feud to a new level until someone broke.”
The investigation takes Dodge around the backstreets of Dubuque and Galena and through the backwaters of the Mississippi River. Many locations may seem familiar to area residents.
Double-Dealing in Dubuque is the second book in a series of mysteries set in places along the Mississippi River. It is published by Travel Passages and is available wherever books are sold, including through local bookstores and on-line retailers like Amazon. Rock Island Lines, the first Frank Dodge mystery, was released at the end of 2014.
Dean Klinkenberg is a land-locked river rat who writes fiction and non-fiction about the Mississippi River. In addition to the Frank Dodge mysteries, he is also the author of the Mississippi Valley Traveler guidebooks. Follow his fiction at DeanKlinkenberg.com. He writes about the culture and history of the Mississippi Valley at MississippiValleyTraveler.com. He lives in St. Louis.
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