Acey Tapp is a down-on-his-luck kind of guy.  He needs work in order to pay for his mother's increasing medical care costs.  Acey heads to a local investigations firm hoping the owner will hire him, instead the owner, Webb McCunn, collapses and Acey winds up saving the man's life.  After the ambulance leaves, Acey is mistaken for the actual investigator and asked to find a teenager who vanished in 1956.

After visiting Webb in the hospital, Acey gets the job he wants and enters into his very first case.  The problem is that the missing girl may be connected to a local homeless man whose body has just been discovered.  Acey delves into the case risking his own neck in the process.  Nothing is quite as it appears.  As more people vanish, Acey wonders just what happened all those years ago.

THE HOBO CHRONICLES starts off with a bang.  Unfortunately for this reader, the pace slowed in the middle of the book and never quite picked up the same enthusiasm from that point on.  While I loved the novel's beginning, I found it harder to finish the story because of the pace change.

With a little more polish that often comes with subsequent novels, I am interested to see what happens next with Acey.