Five novels from Left Seat Press: the four Joe Tracy mysteries and Paradise Air. Every book will be available in hardcover, paperback and ebook from bookstores and online retailers, beginning with Angel’s Flight on December 1, 2026.
The Joe Tracy Mysteries
Joe Tracy has flown for the Navy, played a detective on a New York soap opera and buried his wife. Now he lives in an airplane hangar at the little Santa Carmella airport with a cocker spaniel named Penny, a wrecked Staggerwing nose-down through the roof and a brand-new private investigator’s license that his partner, Miles King, isn’t sure he should have.
With Miles and Twyla from the Barnstormers diner, Joe takes the cases nobody else wants. Each one takes him a little closer to the one mystery he has never solved: who he really is. The books are best read in order.
Angel’s Flight
A Joe Tracy Mystery · Book One · December 1, 2026
She was beautiful, frightened and possibly lying. Joe Tracy took the case anyway.
Joe Tracy is a former Navy pilot, a former soap-opera detective and a brand-new private investigator who lives in an airplane hangar at the little Santa Carmella airport. When Angel Robillard steps out of a black Jaguar with an envelope full of cash and asks him to get back a videotape, no police and no questions, it sounds like easy money.
Within a day Joe has been knocked cold in an orange grove, the man with the tape is fighting for his life, and the trail leads back fifteen years to a helicopter crash and a secret someone in Santa Carmella is still willing to kill to keep.
Hardcover, paperback and ebook · Coming December 1, 2026
Hardcover 979-8-953724-01-2 · Paperback 979-8-953724-00-5 · Ebook 979-8-953724-02-9
The Key Lime Call
A Joe Tracy Mystery · Book Two · January 5, 2027
His old friend promised him a free trip to Florida. He forgot to mention the dead informant.
Cal Hughes wants Joe in Key West under another man’s name, getting current in seaplanes and getting close to a dockside fixer called Buzz Bazzano. The informant who had Joe’s name in his notebook left something else behind: a drawing of a palm tree full of numbers.
Everyone in Key West seems to want it. The trail runs from a Havana casino chip to an old waterfront church, a drowned wreck and a secret hidden beneath the reef.
Hardcover, paperback and ebook · Coming January 5, 2027
Hardcover 979-8-953724-04-3 · Paperback 979-8-953724-03-6 · Ebook 979-8-953724-05-0
Mercury’s Daughter
A Joe Tracy Mystery · Book Three · February 2, 2027
Scarlet learned every con in the book from her mother. This time she stole from the wrong man.
When Bonita turns up at Joe’s hangar in tears, with three thousand dollars in hundreds and a cigar tube full of diamonds, he knows better than to say yes. He says yes anyway. Her daughter has vanished with something that belongs to Hugo Zucco, and behind Zucco stands an operation known only as Mercury, with a deadline of Tuesday at midnight.
The search leads somewhere Joe never expected: back to St. Maria’s, the orphanage where his own life began.
Hardcover, paperback and ebook · Coming February 2, 2027
Hardcover 979-8-953724-07-4 · Paperback 979-8-953724-06-7 · Ebook 979-8-953724-08-1
The Barn Find Case
A Joe Tracy Mystery · Book Four · March 2, 2027
He went to Kansas to visit his parents’ graves. He found a barn full of cars worth killing for.
A local collector has turned up dead at Wichita Airport, cremated before his widow ever saw the body. His padlocked barn holds cars that collectors would sell their souls for, and a polished European broker has already come to take them away.
When a letter from the woman who raised him finally names the mother who gave him up, Joe follows the trail from the Kansas wheat fields to a private vault in Geneva and an auction on Lake Lugano, where a Ferrari hidden for decades may hold the truth about who Joe Tracy really is.
Hardcover, paperback and ebook · Coming March 2, 2027
Hardcover 979-8-953724-10-4 · Paperback 979-8-953724-09-8 · Ebook 979-8-953724-11-1
Also by Alan Austin
Paradise Air
A Novel · April 6, 2027
They promised him a shiny new turboprop. They gave him the FUGA.
Jimmy Nichols thinks a job with a Caribbean commuter airline is his big break. Then he meets the airplane: a fat shoebox with stubby wings and more INOP stickers than working gauges. Paradise Air turns out to be a circus disguised as an airline, and the FUGA has a habit nobody will put on paper, one that has already cost a planeload of lives.
Armed with gallows humor and a camera, Jimmy sets out to survive long enough to find a way out. A darkly funny, mostly true story drawn from Alan’s years flying commuters out of San Juan.
Hardcover, paperback and ebook · Coming April 6, 2027
Hardcover 979-8-953724-13-5 · Paperback 979-8-953724-12-8 · Ebook 979-8-953724-14-2
Published by Left Seat Press, Reno, Nevada. Booksellers, librarians and reviewers can reach Alan through the Contact page.