Bright and Yellow, Hard and Cold - Softcover

The search for elusive goals consumes three men... McKinney, a forensic scientist, struggles with his deep, personal need to find the truth behind the evidence he investigates, even while the system shuts him out. Can he get justice for a wrongfully accused man while juggling life with a new girlfriend and a precocious teenage daughter? Delroy gives up the hard-scrabble life on his family's Kentucky farm and ventures to the rough-and-tumble world of 1930s Chicago. Unable to find work, he reluctantly throws his hat in with the bank-robbing gangsters Alvin Karpis and Freddie Barker. Can he provide for his fiery young wife without risking his own life? Gilbert is obsessed with the search for a cache of gold, hidden for nearly eighty years. As his hunt escalates he finds himself willing to use ever more extreme measures to attain his goal...including kidnapping, torture and murder. Can he find the one person still left who will lead him to the glittering treasure? And will the trail of corpses he leaves behind include McKinney? Part contemporary thriller, part historical novel, and part love story, "Bright and Yellow, Hard and Cold" masterfully weaves a tale of conflicted scientific ethics, economic hardship, and criminal frenzy, tempered with the redemption of family love.

Tim Chapman is a former forensic scientist for the Chicago Police Department who currently teaches English composition and Chinese martial arts. His fiction has been published in "The Southeast Review," "The Reader," "Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine," and the anthology "The Rich and the Dead." He lives in Chicago with his wife, Ellen.