Down for the Count

Detective Toby Peters hunts the men who killed his ex-wife’s new husband

Heavyweight champ Joe Louis did not want to find a dead body today. After passing the afternoon with a woman who is not his wife, he’s jogging on the beach when he sees two men standing over a corpse. He raises his fists, and they run. Toby Peters is even more sorry to see the body than Louis, for in a way, the dead man is family. Toby’s ex-wife called him that morning, begging him to find her husband, who had disappeared after a week of threats on his life. This was not the way she wanted him found.

Peters agrees to help Louis stay out of the papers while he investigates the murder. But when he learns that the dead man had lately taken a serious interest in boxing, a connection to Joe Louis starts to look like a fatal mistake.