Dan Sharp Mysteries 4-Book Bundle by Jeffrey Round Page A

subject’s face, an old sharkie they’d been tracing for a dog’s age. The man made a cutting motion across his neck. Dan put a hand over the receiver.
    â€œConfirmed?”
    A stiff nod. “Just came in. Nasty stuff — looks like gangland. I’ve got the deets when you want them….”
    Fifty-five Division came back on the line. Dan held up a finger while he wrote down the specs. When he turned around, his colleague was gone.
    The wall clock crept around to eleven. The numbers swam in his field of vision. It was going to be a long, slow morning. Dan rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t hit forty yet, and genetics said it was only going to get worse. Maybe he should stop while he was ahead. Take up a kinder, gentler career. Whatever that might be.
    Bob had left Dan enough money to finish university, but Dan balked when it came time to choose. He’d wanted a career that sounded impressive and might be helpful to others. But what was that? Bob had listened thoughtfully while Dan ran through the possibilities: doctor, lawyer, maybe even a minister. But, as Bob pointed out, Dan got faint at the sight of blood, hated debates, and didn’t believe in the existence of anything that could vaguely be construed as God-like. That seemed to cancel out his hopes in those areas.
    â€œGo for the money,” Bob advised, “but make sure it’s something you enjoy. Forty years is a long time to do something you don’t like.”
    Bob tried to steer him toward a vocation where he had aptitude as well as interest, but this proved elusive. Dan had mechanical skills, but the usual choices — plumbing and engineering — held little appeal. And while he had a love of cultural things, music in particular, he had no real artistic inclinations. What Dan knew and seemed to grasp instinctively was other human beings — how they interacted, what motivated and intrigued them. Human resources could always use good people, Bob argued, but discouraged Dan from a career that would cement him in the business world. He was too bright and restless to get bogged down in the corporate mentality.
    At the time, it made sense for Dan to attend the University of Toronto and stay with Bob. But then Bob died and his nieces and nephews sold the house. His future uncertain, Dan enrolled in a smattering of courses, hoping to ferret out his interests and potential skill sets shotgun style. He excelled in psychology and sociology but found the disciplines too wide-ranging to hold his attention for long. If he’d been asked what interested him most, he would have narrowed it down to the well-being of other people, but that hardly sounded like a career.
    In his second year, he chose a path with the impressive sounding label of Social-Cultural Anthropology, and then got sidetracked briefly by paleontology, thinking he might find himself tracking skeletons in the deserts of Africa. But the dream was more glamorous than the reality — the bone business was already overrun with various social misfits and wannabes who ended up running safari operations for tourists. In the meantime, university failed to stimulate him. He found the academic world labyrinthine, astounded to learn his fellow students might spend years pursuing such abstruse matters as the history of various disciplines without ever tackling the actual subjects.
    Ultimately, he didn’t take well to studying — possibly because Bob was no longer around to impress or because he’d just lost his home a second time. The centre of his universe hadn’t held once again, and it showed. His course advisor summed it up when she told him he had a piercing but restless mind, striking a similar chord to what Bob had said. His papers showed brilliance, but he folded on the exams. She hoped he’d do better.
    He might have, but something sidetracked him first. Whatever else those two years had given Dan, they’d brought the realization that