Charlie Pike

Every park has a backstage. Not everyone walks out of it.Orlando sells sunshine by the millions. Private investigator Charlie Pike knows what it costs to keep the smiles running on schedule.With a cop's instincts and a comedian's mouth, Charlie spends his days chasing cheating spouses and lost rings — until April Mercer walks into his office on Lake Eola with a question the police won't touch. Her brother Dylan was found dead on a coaster catwalk at Crown Kingdom: sixty feet up, after hours, in a place no guest should ever be. The park calls it a tragic accident. April calls it a lie.The deeper Charlie goes, the worse it looks. Dylan isn't the first person to die inside the happiest place in Florida. Someone has been turning accidents into arithmetic — and each time, a park lanyard is found clipped neatly to a railing, returned where it belonged, like a signature only the killer understands.Teaming with Detective Marisol Vega, a cop who never bought the official story either, Charlie starts pulling threads the parks spent a fortune burying. Cover-ups. Erased footage. A company that would rather lose a body than a quarter. And somewhere behind the music and the fireworks, a patient, methodical killer who knows the tunnels better than the people who built them.To stop him, Charlie has to learn the one rule the parks have always lived by: the show must go on — no matter who it buries.The Happiest Place to Die is the first Charlie Pike novel — a twisting, fair-play murder mystery set in the shadows behind the magic, for readers who like their thrillers sharp, their detectives sharper, and their theme parks a little less innocent than the brochure.