East Los Angeles
Turbo and his partner Pablo have spent twenty years solving other people's
problems from a cramped office above a bakery on Whittier Boulevard. They know
every alley, every contact, and every angle in a neighborhood that the rest of
Los Angeles pretends it doesn't exist.
Then a letter arrives from Turbo's mother, and the case that finds them is their
own. Someone has been watching Eleanor Towers' house. Someone wants the old
engineering drawings locked in her cedar chest. Drawings made by Turbo's father,
Robert, a brilliant Port of Los Angeles engineer, who spent years designing a
folding shipping container that could change the economics of global trade. He
filed a patent in 1984. He died in 1989. And somewhere in between, powerful men
with expensive lawyers made sure his work disappeared into procedural limbo.
Now the money behind containerization is moving fast, and the stakes have never
been higher. From the docks of San Pedro to the corridors of the Beverly Hills
Hotel, Turbo, and Pablo follow a trail of shell corporations, federal filings,
and old betrayals, racing to reclaim a dead man's legacy before it's buried for
good.
Some debts don't expire. Some work deserves to survive.