Brinker has lost his magic. The agency’s CEO wants him to ace the competition. His former girlfriend wants him in detox. And as rival advertising executives disappear, an ambitious state trooper wants him in jail.

If this keeps up, the PR whiz who turned a serial killer into a national brand may have to vanish himself.

Throw in toxic waste, a nude car wash and a gun-toting presidential candidate and the czar of PR will have to spin some potent magic to escape the snare of sex, lies and greed that threatens to destroy his job, his sanity and the love of his life.

Brinker does so in Mr. Magic, the second in the series of crime novels starring the defrocked journalist. Mr. Magic plays out in the post-industrial snowbelt of Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, an area I know well after working there in marketing for a decade. While Brinker vows to give up drugs and violence, he’s pulled into the netherworld of forced disappearances by a self-styled travel agent who helps clients vanish in places like Fukushima, Chernobyl and the deserts of the American Southwest.

Published by Allusion Books, the novel is the sequel to Mr. Mayhem. Both books are available through Amazon, iTunes, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and jeffwidmer.com, as well as bookstores everywhere. They join the the novels in the CW McCoy series, Peak Season and Tourist in Paradise, that play out in the tony beach towns of Southwest Florida.

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The nuclear reactors at Fukushima