Familiar Scents

Description

Where crime reeks of corruption, and every scent hides a truth.

Familiar Scents begins with a late-night call that thrusts Detective Carl Steckler into a world stranger than any case before. A break-in at a perfume gallery leaves one woman dead and a web of inconsistencies that don’t add up. At the center of it all stands Anthony Patronio, a charismatic perfumer with a gift that defies explanation: an eidetic memory for smells, and perhaps something even more unnatural.

As Steckler digs deeper, the investigation becomes a collision of hardboiled police work and the surreal. Perfumes, poisons, and paranoia twist together as Patronio insists he can identify criminals by scent alone—and even conjure smells that can choke or beguile. Each clue forces Steckler to confront not only the mystery of the murder, but also his own haunted past and the disappearance of his twin sister decades earlier.

T.S. Kay blends noir grit with supernatural intrigue, crafting a thriller that straddles crime, fantasy, and psychological drama.

Highlights include:

• A hard-edged detective protagonist weighed down by loss and obsession.
• Anthony Patronio, a perfumer whose uncanny gift blurs the line between science and the supernatural.
• Murder, break-ins, and conspiracies centered around the hidden power of scent.
• Atmospheric writing that fuses crime procedural tension with gothic unease.
• Themes of obsession, memory, grief, and the fragile boundary between reality and delusion.

Intense, unsettling, and impossible to pin down, Familiar Scents is for readers who crave their crime fiction laced with the uncanny—and their mysteries infused with shadows that linger long after the case is closed.

Written by T.S. Kay