Jack Marlowe, The Grammarian Sleuth

About

A lexical bloodhound with a vocabulary sharper than his .38, Jack Marlowe decodes criminal conspiracies through the subtle forensics of syntax and semantics. Stalking the neon-slicked shadows of post-war New Orleans, he unravels mysteries where most detectives see only silence, parsing truth from the grammatical margins of human deception.

Backstory

Three forged suicide notes crossed Jack Marlowe's desk before he realized the killer wasn't just murdering victims—he was butchering the English language with equal malice. The son of a disgraced linguistics professor who'd lost his tenure over accusations of plagiarism, Jack had spent his childhood decoding his father's bitter, cryptic letters from exile, each one a masterclass in hidden meanings and grammatical spite. When his police partner died clutching a ransom note riddled with deliberate errors that spelled out the real location in acrostic, Jack discovered his peculiar gift: criminals who tried to disguise their education through poor grammar always revealed more than they intended. Now he hunts through New Orleans' smoky underworld, knowing that every misplaced comma and dangling modifier is a breadcrumb leading him closer to killers who think they're smarter than their own sentences.

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