The Cool Dad (A Calvin Recker Mystery Novel)- Available Now!

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My first novel, The Cool Dad, is available as an ebook today on Amazon Kindle HERE (or click image) for $2.99. Other formats (Nook, paperback) will follow.

Very exciting!!!

Here's a short synopsis and the first chapter. I'll post a chapter a day on the blog for the next couple days until you're sufficiently hooked. Warning: I won't post the whole thing and I WILL stop abruptly. So if you like what you've read, you're just going to have to buy the darn thing.

And if you read it and like it. Write a review. Reviews are like gold in the ebook game. Tell one friend about it. Personal recommendations between friends go a long way.

You're on Team Recker now.

Dive in.

Meet Calvin Recker. He's a stay-at-home dad by day. And night. And naptime. But in between changing diapers and making lunches, he's the hardest-boiled private detective in the western suburbs of Chicago. His specialty is cheating spouses. His three rules for taking cases are: no murders, no cops, and no guns.

Despite what Calvin Recker may think, he is not the cool dad.

Meet Henry Newcombe. He's the cool, young, and impossibly handsome stepdad who just moved into the sleepy subdivision of Stable Bluff.

When Calvin Recker is hired by Henry Newcombe's rich father-in-law to uncover his new son-in-law's mysterious past, he's forced to break his rules, and will need all the help he can get from his wife, Juliet, and his unreliable sidekick, Grover, to get out alive and solve the case by bedtime.

THE COOL DAD is the hilarious and shocking first novel in a series about stay-at-home dad detective Calvin Recker that will keep your whole neighborhood talking all summer long.

1

He looks like Jake Ryan from Sixteen Candles.

Ladies, you know exactly who I’m talking about.

He was the sensitive senior hunk with those chiseled cheekbones and thick head of dark hair, forever leaning against his red Porsche while rocking the sweater vest.

Remember him sitting on the table and blowing out the candles with Samantha?

Melt.

“Marco!” the guy who looks like fictional teen heartthrob Jake Ryan calls from the pool.

“Polo!” a swarm of neighborhood kids treading water scream back.

I pull out my iPhone from Daisy’s diaper bag, click on IMDB, and search the cast of Sixteen Candles.

The actor who played Jake Ryan is named Michael Schoeffling. He only acted in a handful of films after Sixteen Candles and nothing since 1991. I guess he builds handcrafted furniture now, which is totally a Jake Ryan thing to do.

Regardless, Michael Schoeffling is fifty-three years old now and the guy in the pool couldn’t be a day over twenty-nine. Imagine Jake Ryan drove off your TV screen in his red Porsche 944 and landed in Hatchet, Illinois in 2013 without aging a single second since 1984.

And I’m not the only one who noticed the uncanny resemblance. I look around the pool and see all the moms raised on John Hughes movies staring him down while something primal stirs underneath their tankinis and Old Navy cover-ups.

“Marco!” he calls out.

“Polo,” the moms all mouth under their breaths.

Guys, if this all doesn’t make sense to you, imagine Phoebe Cates in Fast Times at Ridgemont High jumps off the diving board.

Then climbs out of the pool.

And walks toward you in slow motion.

Then unhooks her bikini top.

And.

Pause.

Okay, are you still with me? Or do you need a moment? Now you can understand the hormonal electricity buzzing through the pool at 11:45 on a lazy hot Wednesday in the suburbs of Chicago.

But who is this guy?

I haven’t seen him around town before.

He doesn’t look like a dad. Not with those abs.

Maybe he’s an older cousin or a cool uncle?

But he’s definitely not a dad with young kids.

“Hey, Daddy. Look at me!” my three-year-old son, Ryan, calls from the top of the water slide. “I go headfirst!”

Shit. How’d he get up there so quickly?

Daddy fail.

A whistle blows. “Adult swim!” a skinny teenaged male lifeguard wearing dark shades and an all-summer-long tan yells.

“Noooooooo!” the kids in the pool all cry.

More whistles from the team of teenaged lifeguards showing off their authority despite being armed only with their whistles, uniform bathing suits, and a rudimentary understanding of CPR.

The kids splash their way to the corners of the pool and climb up the ladders to their parents who are dreading their arrival.

Adult swim.

Or as it’s known to parents, “Fifteen Minutes of Begging for Money for the Snack Hut So Some Creepy Old Man Can Swim Two Super Slow Laps in the Lane Lines.”

But when the children arrive at their mom’s deckchairs looking for a shakedown, the moms hand over the cash without even looking at them, because they’re all staring at the Jake Ryan look-a-like arm-press himself up out of the pool in what feels like slow motion.

He strokes his perfect thick wavy dark hair back and the water beads and runs down his rock-hard torso. He hikes up his Budweiser bathing trunks, which droop dangerously close to his butt crack. The moms file the mental image away for later that night when they attack their grateful husbands.

Then he does something truly shocking. He walks over to the pale, doughy eight-year-old wearing a white bucket hat, lime green T-shirt, and a smear of pink zinc oxide on his nose, sitting on the edge of the pool and kicking water. He scoops him up and says to him, “How ‘bout some nachos, bro?”

Maybe the kid takes after his mother?

The lifeguard at the waterslide helps Ryan down the ladder and he runs toward me. His initial disappointment at not getting to risk a severe head injury by sliding headfirst is assuaged when he remembers it’s snack time.

“No running,” I yell at him.

Ryan considers my suggestion and decides that walking even faster with stiff legs is a fair compromise.

“Slow down,” I say just loud enough for all the moms in earshot to acknowledge that I’m a decent parent.

I shouldn’t have to worry about my standing here, because before Mr. Too Handsome showed up, I was the King of the Pool Parents. Of course, I’m usually the only dad at the pool during the day in the middle of the week. But still.

“I want pizza. I want a hot dog. I want candy,” Ryan jumps up and down, begging.

“You’ll get nothing and like it,” Mr. Too Handsome says to Ryan as he walks by.

We look at each other and nod the way guys do when a well-timed Caddyshack reference is made. He keeps walking toward the snack hut. I’ll admit that after seeing him up close, it makes me want to put my shirt back on. And shave my back.

Ryan looks confused. He’s never seen Caddyshack, but there’s plenty of time for that. He recovers and says, “I want, uh, cookie cheese!”

I don’t know what cookie cheese is or whether he just invented it out of thin air. “They’re all out of cookie cheese,” I say.

“No, they’re not.”

“Yes they are. They just ran out. There was big run on cookie cheese earlier this morning.”

This confuses the young man. He knows he made up cookie cheese, but he also knows that I’m probably making up the fact that the snack hut actually had the imaginary cookie cheese but has since ran out. We both stare at each other for a long moment, silently communicating, “How far do you want to take this?”

Ryan decides to play his last card.

He stamps his foot. “NO! I WANT COOKIE CHEESE!”

The public temper tantrum.

Royal flush.

“How about a granola bar,” I offer to nip this tamper tantrum in the bud.

“Chocolate ‘nola bar?” he counters.

“Fine,” I say, defeated.

I pull out a melty chocolate-covered granola bar from the swim bag, unwrap it, and hand it to him. He smiles, takes a bite, and I watch all his problems melt away.

I realize that once again I’m the victim of a long con.

“Ah, ah, ah!” I look down and see Daisy pointing toward the Ziploc bag filled with granola bars. Daisy doesn’t really talk yet, but she’s mastered the art of pointing at items she desires. And like most pretty girls, she gets what she wants.

I break off a piece of granola bar and hand it to her.

I’ve got ten more minutes of adult swim to survive.

I turn my attention back to the skinny lifeguard setting up the lane lines for the senior gentleman wearing nose plugs and a swim cap. The old guy is flapping his arms like Michael Phelps and stretching in preparation for his epic two-lap freestyle session. The lifeguard hooks the last lane line. I watch him walk around the perimeter of the pool until he reaches a lifeguard chair occupied by a pretty sun-bleached blond female lifeguard. He says something to her and she laughs while looking down at him from the chair. The male lifeguard looks up at his co-worker like she’s the most beautiful girl in the entire world, and since she’s a pretty high school girl who has spent her summer in the sun, at that exact moment, she just might be.

Her name is Ginny McConkey.

I hold up my iPhone and take a picture.

Click.

Okay, I realize that looked creepy.

I’m doing this because the girl’s father paid me to take the picture.

Okay, back up, back up.

In addition to a stay-at-home dad, I’m also sort of a private detective.

I don’t have a gun or a private detective’s license or anything, but since I’m usually around, people in the neighborhood from time to time ask me to “keep an eye on their spouses” while they’re at work. And usually when they ask me to find out if their spouse is cheating, I could save them the time and money and just answer, “Yes, they totally are.” But, you know, I follow the case through anyway, because other than dress, feed, clean, play, and fight with two kids under four, I don’t really have anything else to do during the day.

Look at it this way. After turning thirty, most guys accumulate weird hobbies like brewing their own beer.

Or running 10-Ks.

Or forming really, really firm opinions about where to buy vegetables.

Is operating a private detective agency any weirder of a way to spend my free time?

Don’t answer that.

But since you guys are coming in late to this Ginny McConkey case, let me just let you in on the twist ending. Ginny’s dad, Gary McConkey, is one of those overprotective dads I imagine myself to be in fifteen years with Daisy. He got wind that not only was his little princess spending her summer getting ogled in a bathing suit, but she also nabbed herself a secret (to her parents) boyfriend. Gary knew that I hung around the pool during the day watching my own kids, so he hired me to keep an eye on his little girl while she worked and to find out who the boyfriend is.

Is he a greaser?

A Shark or a Jet?

Jordan Catalano?

It only took an afternoon to catch Ginny kissing a shaggy boy back behind the snack hut. I followed the boy around for a few days and discovered that he was a year older.

Oh no!

And he was a drug dealer.

The horror!

I’ll let you get over the shock of a pretty teenage girl falling for an older boy with a used car and a cache of weed.

I dug a little deeper on the boyfriend and found out he was a pretty fair drug dealer. Nice product. Good pricing structure. The kid has a good head for business that will serve him well in the cubicle world when he grows up.

I usually specialize in neighbors having affairs or finding out who stole a John Deere riding lawn mower out of someone’s garage. I certainly didn’t become a part-time private detective to break up true love between teenagers or bust an entrepreneur with little dime bags of schwag.

So before I brought my evidence to Gary McConkey, I showed my case to Ginny. She broke down in tears and told me how much she loved Trev.

Teenage girls are so dramatic.

I told her that this wasn’t a reality show confessional booth, so she should save the waterworks.

She wiped her eyes and offered to pay me double not to tell her dad.

I didn’t want to take any of her hard-earned lifeguarding money, so I told her that I had another idea.

“What?” she asked.

“You need a beard,” I said.

“A what?” she said.

“A beard. Someone who pretends to be your boyfriend for the camera while you still date Trev in secret. You need someone who looks totally clean-cut and acceptable. I’ll show your dad the pictures of the two of you and he’ll be relieved that his little girl isn’t dating some serial killer from the wrong side of the tracks.”

She smiled and said, “I know just the guy.”

That’s the fellow lifeguard she’s talking to now.

Click.

 “I want ‘nother one,” Ryan says me with a chocolate-smeared mouth.

“Ah, ah, ah,” Daisy concurs, while pointing at the Ziploc bag.

“No more,” I say. “We have to go home soon. It’s almost lunchtime.”

“No!” Ryan protests.

And after lunchtime is my favorite time of the day.