title: A Dark Sunny Afternoon
author:  Mahyar A Amouzegar 
description: Mahyar has authored over sixty scholarly publications, as auniversity dean of engineering and a senior national security analyst with aprominent think tank. Mahyar has now turned his attentions to his first truelove, literature. This is his first novel.
zlib_text: Brewed, Crude and Tattooed
  
  A Maggy Thorsen Mystery
  
  ![](images/00003.jpg)
  
  Sandra Balzo
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  
  Copyright ©2009 by Sandra Balzo
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter 1
  
  The morning of the ‘Perfect Spring Storm’, as it was later dubbed, dawned dark
  and warm.
  
  Of course, that depends on your definition of dawn. Or even warm, for that
  matter.
  
  To me, Maggy Thorsen, ‘dawn’ means whenever I have to wake up to stumble out
  of the house, usually into the dark, to open my coffeehouse, Uncommon Grounds,
  in Benson Plaza.
  
  That May day, my dawn was at five a.m., the sun not even a faint glow on the
  horizon. And while ‘warm’ was technically a matter of degrees - Fahrenheit, in
  Wisconsin - I measured it more in degrees of undress.
  
  Sticking my nose out the door as my sheepdog Frank watered the hyacinths, I
  decided it was a T-shirt and jeans day. Which, just west of Milwaukee,
  qualifies as warm.
  
  ‘C’mon, Frank, hurry up,’ I said in a stage whisper, so as not to disturb my
  neighbors. I liked to think the whisper w