Book
The Case of
The Whiskey Island Alibi
Series: Vance Sterling: The Cuyahoga Docket
Published July 21, 2026
Somebody put a loaded .38 in Vivian Novak's apron. Then somebody put a dead man in her path.
Cleveland, November 1978. Vivian Novak has been in the papers once already — cleared of a theft she didn't commit, convicted anyway by everyone who read the headline. So when a revolver turns up in her locked locker at the diner, she doesn't call the police. She calls a lawyer.
Vance Sterling's instructions are simple: the gun stays in his office safe overnight, she sleeps at a quiet motel in Lakewood, and in the morning he delivers the whole problem to the Homicide captain personally. By midnight the plan is in pieces. A detour through the dark of Whiskey Island, a black sedan running with its lights off, two blind warning shots fired out a car window — and a Lincoln in the shallows of the Cuyahoga with a dead union man behind the wheel, shot through the temple.
The dead man blackmailed her father. Her revolver shows two spent chambers. The fatal bullet is consistent with her gun. County Prosecutor Evelyn Pryor reads the file and prosecutes it straight, because the file is airtight.
Sterling knows the revolver was unfired hours before the killing — it sat on his own desk. But the one fact that can save Vivian Novak is a fact only her lawyer can swear to, and a lawyer who becomes a witness is a lawyer off the case. To keep her out of prison he will have to prove it another way: with a marine surveyor's tape measure, a county clerk's microfiche, and the two bullets the killer never went looking for.
The Case of the Whiskey Island Alibi is the first case on Vance Sterling: The Cuyahoga Docket — courtroom mysteries in the classic style, set in the analog Cleveland of the late 1970s: fair-play puzzles, shoe-leather investigation, and verdicts turned on evidence the reader has seen all along.
Cleveland, November 1978. Vivian Novak has been in the papers once already — cleared of a theft she didn't commit, convicted anyway by everyone who read the headline. So when a revolver turns up in her locked locker at the diner, she doesn't call the police. She calls a lawyer.
Vance Sterling's instructions are simple: the gun stays in his office safe overnight, she sleeps at a quiet motel in Lakewood, and in the morning he delivers the whole problem to the Homicide captain personally. By midnight the plan is in pieces. A detour through the dark of Whiskey Island, a black sedan running with its lights off, two blind warning shots fired out a car window — and a Lincoln in the shallows of the Cuyahoga with a dead union man behind the wheel, shot through the temple.
The dead man blackmailed her father. Her revolver shows two spent chambers. The fatal bullet is consistent with her gun. County Prosecutor Evelyn Pryor reads the file and prosecutes it straight, because the file is airtight.
Sterling knows the revolver was unfired hours before the killing — it sat on his own desk. But the one fact that can save Vivian Novak is a fact only her lawyer can swear to, and a lawyer who becomes a witness is a lawyer off the case. To keep her out of prison he will have to prove it another way: with a marine surveyor's tape measure, a county clerk's microfiche, and the two bullets the killer never went looking for.
The Case of the Whiskey Island Alibi is the first case on Vance Sterling: The Cuyahoga Docket — courtroom mysteries in the classic style, set in the analog Cleveland of the late 1970s: fair-play puzzles, shoe-leather investigation, and verdicts turned on evidence the reader has seen all along.