The Valley sells tomorrow. Harlan Kade digs up yesterday's dead.
Los Angeles, 1955. Private investigator Harlan Kade expects a routine insurance inspection at a half-built San Fernando Valley subdivision. Bent machinery. False claim. Easy money.
Instead, he finds orchard foreman Earl Tandy face down in an irrigation ditch, a planted whiskey bottle nearby and strange packing fiber under the dead man's nails.
By the time Kade gets back to his downtown office, all he wants is a simple cheating-spouse job and enough cash to keep the landlord quiet. Then June Larkin walks through his door with a blood-spotted packing slip, a torn property map, and her dead husband's last strange words:
Low grade stays home.
What looks like a widow's grief over a land dispute turns into something bigger, meaner, and buried deep beneath the Valley's new suburban dream. Old orchard owners are vanishing on paper. Dead men are signing title transfers. Funeral trucks are moving through citrus groves after midnight. And Orchard Crest Estates is selling fresh lawns over old graves.
To find the truth, Kade follows a trail of bus tickets, forged deeds, funeral ledgers, cull crates, and frightened witnesses through the hard underbelly of 1955 Los Angeles. Every answer costs him blood. Every clue points closer to men with money, lawyers, and hired muscle.
They think old dirt stays quiet.
They have not met Harlan Kade.
The Neon Orchard is a fast, hardboiled large-print pulp thriller packed with crooked land deals, brutal fights, smoky rooms, paper trails, bad men, worse money, and one battered private eye who refuses to let the dead be turned into paperwork.
