A Hardboiled Noir Series · Los Angeles, 1950

Blood & Bourbon The Jack Morrison Mystery Files

An ex-LAPD detective works the cases the city would rather bury. A Colt .45 in the drawer, bourbon in the cup, and a code he can't quite drink away.

Solving mysteries one corpse at a time.
Creating mysteries one bullet at a time.

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Blood Wing · Finalist, ProWritingAid Novel Beginnings. Top 10 of 14,570 entries.
The Case Files
2
Case Files
1950–51
Cold War Los Angeles
14,570
Entries Blood Wing Outlasted
★★★★★
Readers' Favorite Reviews
The Case Files

Two cases. One detective. No clean endings.

File No. 01
Case Closed Blood Tide cover: a moonlit harbor with silhouetted cranes and red dock lights.
Series Entry One · Los Angeles, 1950

Blood Tide

A Harbor Noir Thriller

The harbor keeps two kinds of secrets: the kind that make men rich, and the kind that make them dead.

Private detective Jack Morrison stopped caring a long time ago. Then the morning paper says his war buddy Tom Reed is dead, and the cops call it a robbery gone wrong. Morrison knows a professional hit when it reeks of salt, diesel, and department-issue lead. Reed had been asking questions about a harbor full of secrets, and the answers run all the way up to the captain who taught Morrison everything about being a detective. With corrupt badges closing in, Morrison plays his one clean angle: a federal prosecutor named Martin Phillips. The reckoning comes at the pier's edge, where justice and vengeance turn out to be the same thing.

1950s NoirHardboiled PIHarbor CorruptionFor Chandler & Ellroy Readers
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File No. 02
Finalist · 2026 Blood Wing cover: a C-124 aircraft on a wet tarmac under a red-lit night sky.
Series Entry Two · Long Beach, Winter 1951

Blood Wing

A Cold War Noir Thriller

In 1950s Long Beach, some secrets are built to never see daylight.

A Black night janitor is dead on the floor of the Douglas Aircraft plant, and the company calls it an industrial accident. His brother Samuel, a Buffalo Soldier who once shared a foxhole with Morrison in Italy, knows better. He asks Morrison to do the one thing every other door has refused to do: look. Behind the plant's windowless walls, Morrison finds a Cold War secret worth killing for, and a federal machine that would rather the truth never existed at all. He can give the family the truth. Making the world admit it is another matter.

Cold War EspionageHistorical Noir1951ProWritingAid Finalist
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The World of Jack Morrison

The recurring cast of a crooked town.

Subject

Jack Morrison

Ex-LAPD, now a private eye with a bourbon habit and a code he can't quite kill. He solves the cases the department writes off, and he pays for every one of them.

Location

Cooper's Diner

Morrison's booth in the corner, and Maggie O'Brien, who has run the place for twenty years and reads his face before he says a word.

Federal Contact

Martin Phillips

The Assistant U.S. Attorney who plays it straight when it counts. The only clean channel to a kind of justice that still leaves a mark.

The Beat

The Harbor

Cranes, salt, diesel, and moonlight on black water. The edge of Los Angeles, where the tide brings things in and carries things out.

Evidence

The .45 and the Bottle

Two tools of the trade. One for the questions nobody wants asked. One for the answers nobody wanted found.

Standing Order

Incomplete Justice

In Morrison's files, the guilty rarely get what they deserve. Sometimes the truth, told to the people who earned it, is all there is. It would have to be enough.

The Evidence

The reviews are in.

★★★★★
Blood Wing is a spectacular thriller. Well written and completely immersive. Very highly recommended.
Jamie Michele, Readers' Favorite
★★★★★
Grabs you by the scruff of the neck and refuses to let you go until the last few pages. An absolute must read.
Pikasho Deka, Readers' Favorite
★★★★★
I highly recommend this satisfying read to spy thriller and historical fiction fans.
Olga Markova, Readers' Favorite
★★★★★
Douglas's mastery of 1940s to 50s noir is impressive. As I read it, I wondered if the manuscript had been locked in a time vault for decades. An excellent example of a gritty crime tale.
Gaius Konstantine, Readers' Favorite · on Blood Tide
Blood Tide reads like what might happen if Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy sat down to craft a story. Sharp dialogue, vivid atmosphere, and moral questions that linger after the last page.
Maria Ashford, Bookshelfie · on Blood Tide
The Author

Daniel P. Douglas

Black and white author photo of identical twins Phil and Paul Garver.
Phil (left) · Paul (right)

Daniel P. Douglas is the pen name for identical twins Phil and Paul Garver. Phil is a U.S. Army veteran who served as a senior analyst in the U.S. Intelligence Community before retiring from federal service in 2023. Paul spent more than thirty years in the museum profession, including work for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and now works as a mental health counselor.

In 2026, the novella Blood Wing was named a finalist in ProWritingAid's Novel Beginnings contest, one of ten chosen from 14,570 entries. Douglas is also a Foreword Reviews IndieFab Book of the Year finalist and a Readers' Favorite Award winner. His earlier work ranges from the conspiracy thriller Truth Insurrected: The Saint Mary Project to the World War II intrigue of the Richter's War series and the space westerns of the Wild Frontier Chronicles.

ProWritingAid Novel Beginnings 2026 finalist and Readers' Favorite five-star seals for Blood Wing.

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