The author of eight New York Times bestsellers, including the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Stephen R. Donaldson lives in northern New Mexico.

"Authoritative."
--Publishers Weekly on The Man Who Fought Alone

"Fun...He ought to follow this up."
--San Jose Mercury-News on The Man Who Fought Alone

Mick "Brew" Axbrewder is a P.I. who's seen better days. A while back, deeply into alcoholism, he accidentally shot and killed a cop. Worse, the cop turned out to be his own brother. Even worse, in a case not long after that, in order to protect Brew from the consequences of his mistakes, his partner, Ginny Fistoulari, blew off her own left hand.

Now Mick works mostly as hired muscle for Ginny. They don't talk much; they've lost too much already. But their latest client's story doesn't add up. He claims to be on the run from mobsters to whom he owes large gambling debts. But he seems almost capriciously determined to get into harm's way and to drag Brew and Ginny into the line of fire beside him.

Just to survive this case, much less solve it, Brew and Ginny are going to have to start working together better. And Brew's going to have to face up to his greatest fears.

Over two decades ago, bestselling author Stephen R. Donaldson published three novels about Mick Axbrewder and Ginny Fistoulari as paperback originals under the pseudonym "Reed Stephens." More recently, under his own name, Donaldson published a new novel in the sequence, The Man Who Fought Alone; subsequently, the first novel in the sequence, The Man Who Killed His Brother, appeared under Donaldson's own name for the first time. Now, for Donaldson's millions of readers worldwide, the second of the original books, The Man Who Risked His Partner, also appears (in slightly revised form) under Donaldson's own name.

"Authoritative."
--Publishers Weekly on The Man Who Fought Alone

"Fun...He ought to follow this up."
--San Jose Mercury-News on The Man Who Fought Alone

Mick "Brew" Axbrewder is a P.I. who's seen better days. A while back, deeply into alcoholism, he accidentally shot and killed a cop. Worse, the cop turned out to be his own brother. Even worse, in a case not long after that, in order to protect Brew from the consequences of his mistakes, his partner, Ginny Fistoulari, blew off her own left hand.

Now Mick works mostly as hired muscle for Ginny. They don't talk much; they've lost too much already. But their latest client's story doesn't add up. He claims to be on the run from mobsters to whom he owes large gambling debts. But he seems almost capriciously determined to get into harm's way and to drag Brew and Ginny into the line of fire beside him.

Just to survive this case, much less solve it, Brew and Ginny are going to have to start working together better. And Brew's going to have to face up to his greatest fears.

Over two decades ago, bestselling author Stephen R. Donaldson published three novels about Mick Axbrewder and Ginny Fistoulari as paperback originals under the pseudonym "Reed Stephens." More recently, under his own name, Donaldson published a new novel in the sequence, The Man Who Fought Alone; subsequently, the first novel in the sequence, The Man Who Killed His Brother, appeared under Donaldson's own name for the first time. Now, for Donaldson's millions of readers worldwide, the second of the original books, The Man Who Risked His Partner, also appears (in slightly revised form) under Donaldson's own name.

1
 
 
Six months after that bomb took Ginny’s left hand off, she still hadn’t gotten over it. I didn’t need a degree in psychology or a message from God to figure out what was going on. I lived with her—I could see it.
And I was living with her for all the wrong reasons. Not because she liked having me around. Not because she thought I was a particularly nice person to share a bed with. And certainly not because I was so all-fired tidy that I made the mess in her apartment stand up and salute.
No, I was living with her because she couldn’t live by herself anymore. She only had one hand. She needed somebody to take care of her.
If I’d said that to people who knew her, they would’ve laughed out loud. Sure, Axbrewder. She needs you. Tell us another one. She was Ginny Fistoulari, the boss and brains of Fistoulari Investigations. With her keen gray eyes and her attractive face and blond hair and the way her tall lean body moved in her clothes, she could’ve been a society doll, the wife of some big snort who owned a country club or two, or maybe just half the first-born children in Puerta del Sol. But her nose had been broken once when some clown had clipped her with a crowbar—to which she’d replied by shooting the sucker in the face. And she’d lost her hand by holding a bomb out the window of a hospital so that it wouldn’t blow up in the building or on the people below. When things got tough, she had a way of looking like her features were molded over iron instead of bone.
As for me—at six foot five and too heavy, I was big enough that most people wouldn’t ordinarily laugh at the idea I was needed. But I was only temporarily sober. I was known to be totally fubar, “fucked up beyond all repair,” even before that wonderful day—the highlight of my life—when in a fit of civic righteousness and alcohol I’d tried to apprehend a purse-snatcher and ended up shooting my brother instead. Like they say, anybody who can’t aim a .45 better than that ought to have his brains recalled for production defects. And I was never going to get my license back. The commission watched Ginny like a hawk because she insisted on hiring me when I didn’t have a license.
Sure, Axbrewder. She needs you. Tell us another one.
Well, in this particular case, “temporarily sober” had been going on for six months. Almost every night I dreamed about the special amber peace you can only find somewhere near the bottom of a bottle, and woke up grinding my teeth. Almost every day, when I wasn’t braced for it, my throat ached for the lovely burn of whiskey. I still had withdrawal flashes that made me sweat and tremble and hold my head like a junkie. The simple smell of scotch was enough to turn my guts inside out.
On bad days, when I got out of bed, I said to myself, Maybe today’s the day. The day I get to take a drink. Just one. Or maybe two. Two drinks can’t hurt me. I’ve earned two drinks.
But I didn’t do it.
For a drunk like me, sobriety is like trying to push a brick wall down with your nose. Six months of it gets to be pretty painful. But I hadn’t had a drink yesterday, or last week, or last month, and I wasn’t going to have one today.
Because Ginny really did need me.
She wasn’t actually helpless. In practice, she could’ve done just about anything she wanted. With her purse on a strap over her right shoulder, she could get what she needed out of it almost as fast as usual. And the doctors had fitted her with a prosthetic device—“the claw,” she called it—that looked pretty handy to me. Sure, it was made of stainless steel, which isn’t exactly one of the primary flesh tones. But it strapped over her stump and worked off the muscles of her forearm, so that she could open and close the pair of hooks just by acting like she still had fingers. Down at the base, they had sharp edges that came together like scissors—which I thought was a nice touch. And they were strong enough to punch in the tops of beer cans.
She refused to wear the damn thing.
It made her feel worse.
The problem was simple. She was Ginny Fistoulari, hotshot private investigator, smart, tough, give-me-a-running-start-and-I-can-do-anything. And she was maimed. Without her hand, she felt like a cripple, ugly, undesirable, and bitter. The claw made her hate herself.
I knew exactly how she felt. I was Mick Axbrewder, the drunk who killed his own brother. She never would’ve lost her hand if I’d had the brains God gave a spaniel—if, for example, I’d thought of using my belt to hold that bomb.
So I took care of her.
Yes sir, we were quite a pair. Leaning on each other because neither one of us had the bare guts to stand up alone. Me, I was used to it. But I hadn’t expected it to happen to her. If I hadn’t been so busy being dogged and useful, I would’ve gone out and become a drunk again just to forget the constant misery burning like a low-grade fever in her eyes. Those eyes used to be as sharp and alive as a hunter’s. Now they just hurt.
Somebody should’ve locked the two of us away in a nursing home somewhere so we wouldn’t get into any more trouble. But maybe that wouldn’t have solved the problem. And maybe trouble comes to those who need it. We sure as hell needed something.
Monday morning we slept in later than usual because we were between cases and didn’t have anything better to do. I got out of bed first, used the bathroom, and went to make the coffee. While the pot was perking, I cleaned up the mess she’d made in the apartment the night before.
Her apartment was in Turtleshell, a complex near what used to be the business center of town, before the banks moved. The building was at least middle-aged, but it was designed and furnished in the American Impersonal absence of style. She could’ve been living in Indianapolis. She stood it the same way she stood the clutter.
Which wasn’t all that bad—her coat on the floor, clothes dropped wherever she happened to be when she took them off, coffee cups everywhere, case and tax records tossed down on the table so hard that a lot of them had splashed onto the carpet. Anyway, I couldn’t really object to it. I knew why she did it. It was as close as she could come to expressing her resentment.
Before she lost her hand, of course, she’d been messy out of ordinary absentmindedness. Too many other things to think about. But now she cluttered the apartment because she knew that I was going to clean it up. She resented being dependent—so she resented me for helping her, for being the one she was dependent on—so she did little things to make my job harder.
We had a lot in common that way. I kept cleaning up after her for exactly the same reason.
In fact, we were spending more and more time playing that kind of game. When the coffee was ready, I took her a cup. But instead of drinking it, she let it get cold while she was in the shower. Then she had me pour her a fresh cup. Meanwhile I fixed her a breakfast she didn’t want and could hardly choke down. If I’d been anybody else, I couldn’t have made her eat breakfast by holding a gun to her head. By preference she lived on vitamin pills and coffee until at least noon.
It was a rotten way to live....