Et Tu Brady

By Joseph Collum

Huck Finn meets Murph the SurfMax Brady is truly happy for the first time since the death of his wife on 9/11. Life is good running his little bar on Fort Lauderdale Beach and stealing as much time as the law allows with Rose Becker, the beautiful crusading City Commissioner. Then, in the blink of an eye, everything changes. Brady finds himself reliving a nightmare he'd thought long buried beneath the sands of time. It is Super Bowl Week in South Florida, but Brady is too busy to enjoy the party. Old friends are being murdered. People are plotting to destroy him. And Rose. And a homicidal jewel thief may have risen from the dead, exposing the dark secret of his Brady's supposedly idyllic Huck Finn childhood. In this hurly-burly sequel to Brady's Run, Max is still in a frantic race to save his friends, lovers past and present, and himself. Along the way he encounters pirate gold, a hungry shark, an ancient diary, and shocking betrayal. The story begins in 1674 when a pirate ship laden with a vast treasure sinks in a hurricane off southeastern Florida. Three hundred years later, 13-year-old Max and his friends discover gold coins while scuba diving on Three Mile Reef. But Max isn't sure what enthralls him more, the sunken treasure or Delray Chance, the angelic girl he'd been dreaming about as long as he could remember. He is living out an idyllic summer, the best of his young life, water skiing, scuba diving, and kissing Delray beneath a seagrape tree at Whiskey Creek. Then it all blows up. Max discovers a dashing jewel thief and his ruthless accomplice burying something on a deserted island. They kidnap him and his friends and shanghai the kids out on a black and stormy sea to find the gold and murder them. What happens that night will haunt them the rest of their lives. Cut to three decades later. Brady is a retired NYPD cop and ex-federal prosecutor with a beach bar in Fort Lauderdale. His only desire is to be with Rose Becker. Enter Delray Chance. Brady hasn't seen or heard from her in 29 years. But her brother has been murdered and police suspect she killed him. Delray contacts Max and asks him to save her. Still gorgeous at age 42, she may also be plotting to steal him from Rose. The deeper Brady digs the more evidence he uncovers that the murder is tied to the gold they found in childhood, unleashing dark remembrances he thought he'd forgotten. That leads him to an unforgettable cast of characters. Penelope Peacock, the muscle-bound tattooist. Lance Jeffries, the lecherous Bible-quoting NFL superstar. Lazarus, the charismatic huckster and Goth bar Romeo. There is a one-eyed shark, an alligator traveling 90 miles per hour, and a Burmese Python as thick as a telephone pole. Et Tu Brady is fiction inspired by actual events, the 1967 Whiskey Creek murders committed by notorious jewel thief Jack "Murph the Surf" Murphy. Author Joseph Collum grew up playing on Whiskey Creek and was haunted by the murders and spent decades molding this page-turning sequel to his critically acclaimed first novel Brady's Run.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1482601478
• ISBN13: 9781482601473
• Release Date: July 2013
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 652 Pages
• Weight: 1.01 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.5" x 6.0"