Blue Mood

Blue Mood

by Lloyd Penry

“I lifted my face, leaving an abstract smear behind. Wiping it with my sleeve blurred the evidence. Evidence that I’d slept better in borrowed silence than I ever had in the arms of someone who cared.”

“The only things that ever broke in a place this beautiful were the people themselves. And they were beautiful too. Designer men and women, caught in the same fragile dance with designer pills.”

Former detective William “Billy” Blaze is just trying to keep the lights on at his nameless consultancy on Eventide Boulevard when a stranger drops a fat envelope of cash and a single request: find Adélia Gerrold, a beautiful, troubled young woman who vanished from the wrong side of Ocean Parade.

She vanished.

Blaze has learned that some disappearances are better left unsolved-but this one won’t let him go. The trail runs from powder-stained bedsheets through the city’s blooming after-dark garden, down Avoca’s shadowed laneways, and into Isla Sombría’s glittering resort underworld. Everywhere he turns, whispers of dreamflower rise-a designer drug sweeping through Hourglass County like a tide-and men willing to kill to keep it flowing.

He followed.

Stalked by a metallic purple Corvette with plates that read L8NITE, trailed by crooked lawyers, fading cops, and ghosts of his own past, Blaze spirals deeper into a world where nothing is what it seems. The closer he comes to Adélia, the more he is seduced by the dark current threatening to drag him under.

The rest is what you came here for.

Part crime thriller, part refracted fairytale, Blue Mood reimagines the Pretty Woman myth through Blaze’s weary, haunted eyes. A hard-boiled, dream-drenched noir about power, corruption, and obsession-saturated with the atmosphere of the early nineties, alive with the music, cars, and danger of the decade.

“Imagine Dalton’s 1987 Bond sensibilities crashing into Moore’s polished playground. That’s the raw, stylish dissonance of Blue Mood.”