Excerpt from Suburban Dicks by Fabian Nicieza , plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Before getting into her car, the woman said, "Oh and one last thing, you also let a foreign vehicle drive across your crime scene and then didn't stop a small child from taking a massive–and I really do mean impressively massive–piss all over the potential path the killer's car took to enter the station. The acid in the urine will affect the analysis of those tire marks from where the killer drove away." 

Michelle looked around. "What tire marks?" She looked down around her feet and saw only some smudges. Had she stepped all over the tire marks?

She heard the van's automatic car door close and looked up, "Wait!"

After two tries at stretching the straps over her belly, the woman finally fastened her seat belt. The disdain in her eyes softened slightly. The woman lowered the window.

"Let me give you a freebie," she said. "From the angle of the bullet strikes, the shooter had likely stepped out of his car when the shots were fired."

The woman rolled up the window and, without a second look, backed into a sharp k-turn. She blew past Niket and out the wrong way through the entrance, hanging a right into traffic before the light changed, driving west down Rt. 571.

Michelle and Niket locked eyes.

"What the hell was that?" she asked.

Niket shrugged his shoulders.

Chapter Two

Andrea Stern drove down Abbington Lane faster than she should have. It was a self-contained, U-shaped residential block with less than twenty houses on it, a rarity for the McMansion developments of the area. She jerked the Odyssey on to her driveway. The bumper scraped the driveway's heavily-pitched apron. She pressed the remote attached to the visor several times in rapid succession, but had to brake hard when the garage door wouldn't open. The remote needed new batteries.

"Push it slowly and hold it down, mom," said Ruth, drawing "mom" out in an annoyed rollercoaster drone.

Mooooommm did as her oldest daughter suggested. The door opened.

Catching Ruth's smug grin in the rearview mirror, Andrea dreaded her daughter reaching puberty. The only thing that made Andrea's present-day misery tolerable was knowing how much more miserable she would be in a few years. She stopped the car in the junk-cluttered garage. Any weekend now, Jeff would be sure to clean it.

Ruth and Elijah rushed between the middle row seats past their younger sisters and opened the sliding doors. "Dibs on the swings! Dibs on the swings!" they said simultaneously and repeatedly. Whining, Sarah and Sadie struggled against their belts in their respective booster and safety seats.

Excerpted from Suburban Dicks by Fabian Nicieza. Copyright © 2021 by Fabian Nicieza. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.