Corbin Kohl Baited In Hell is a fun low-fantasy cozy mystery full of heart, humor, and optimism no matter your circumstances. The second book in the series.
UFO SIGHTING IN HELL. Seriously.
Corbin Kohl thought he figured out the City. He acclimated to the heat. Made the fiery Pit his hangout spot. He even found the bright side of his unpaid gig with Management.
But the City just got weirder.
There’s a UFO hovering in the sky. It looks harmless to Corbin, but it’s got Management in a tizzy. They’re secretive about it as usual. But his next assignment seems connected.
And—wait—did his boss just threaten his friends?!
Corbin Kohl is back in Corbin Kohl Baited In Hell!
Descend into this must-read low-fantasy mystery series and find out why Hell is actually kind of fun.
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Corbin Kohl Baited In Hell is Book 2 in the guaranteed-to-make-you-laugh-out-loud fun low-fantasy cozy mystery series Corbin Kohl In Hell. The third book in the series is Corbin Kohl Cornered In Hell. Readers say it’s like coming home to old friends. It features Corbin’s favorite person, his least-favorite person, and some of the City’s biggest movers and shakers… and mysteries.
Corbin Kohl Baited In Hell – Sample Chapter
Chapter 1
So, um, yeah, this morning there was a UFO in the sky.
Or should I say UAP?
Actually, UAP—unidentified aerial phenomenon, the term UFO had been changed to for some reason back when I was still on Earth—was probably the more accurate word in this situation, what with the UFO not so much flying around the City’s yellow sky as it was hovering stationary between the Management Building’s glass tower and the fiery Pit, five blocks away.
That, and the UFO didn’t really look like a flying saucer, either.
UFOs had never really been my thing as a kid. I was more into what was growing and crawling on the ground than what was up in the sky. So in addition to not really being up on the subject’s changing terms, I didn’t know much about the different shapes, colors, or materials of UFOs, either. Or their maneuvers. All I can tell you is that the thing in the air was not a bird, it was not a plane, and if it was Superman, he’d folded himself up into a hovering ball, grown to the size of two Volkswagen Bugs pressed wheels to wheels, and changed his costume from red and blue to a shimmery pale green.
I had first spotted the UFO this morning (along with everyone else in the City, no doubt) when I’d walked out of my apartment and up to the corner of Spoke 1 to catch the Red bus—and seen a shimmery green dot in the sky.
At thirty-six blocks from the Pit, only the Pit’s smoke is visible in the distance, and that day it looked like someone had just thrown a giant bucket of water on the three-quarter-mile-wide, three-story-high caldera, trying to put it out.
No such luck, of course. The fires of Hell burn eternal and all that. (Or so I’m assuming. No one’s confirmed for me yet that I’m actually in Hell.) But the Pit’s smoke had that rolling, bubbly, thick, white, steamy look about it, of water being added to flames. Even the constant smell of sulfur seemed to have been doused.
Off to the left of the cloud of smoke, the UFO hovered like a green star in the sky, just out of its reach. Almost like it had never seen smoke before and couldn’t help but lurk nearby and admire it.
And why not? To say the least, that kind of steam-filled smoke wasn’t something you saw every day around here because water itself wasn’t something you saw every day. I mean, water comes out of the taps somehow, but I had yet to see it in its natural form. No rivers. No lakes. And what passes for rain has the sheen of an oil slick, so I sure wasn’t counting that as water.
To tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure what came out of the taps was actually water, either, or just something that passed for it. It was generally clear, but it had a slight viscous quality, smelled hot and a little like chlorine, and it tasted a lot like sulfur. My Management-provided apartment had a water filter in the fridge, and I was very, very grateful.
As I rode the bus down Spoke 1, toward the Pit, the backs of my legs sweating and sticking to the red vinyl seats, the UFO remained hovering just off to the left, just out of reach of the white, steamy smoke. It didn’t move, didn’t flinch whenever the smoke rolled closer. It just sat there in the sky, like it had always been there. It kind of reminded me of a giant green potato bug pinned to a yellow board, the first and only specimen in some kid’s forgotten dead bug collection.
Everyone riding the bus had their heads out the open-air windows on that side, the left side. If the bus hadn’t been such a heavy, sturdy old thing, like the old school buses I remembered from my school days on Earth, with the high-back vinyl seats, I might’ve worried about all that weight tipping us over. But the bus trundled along, tooting to a jerky stop every so often to pick up more passengers wearing sweat-stained T-shirts and shorts. All of them ducked as they climbed the stairs and boarded the bus, in order to maintain a visual of the UFO through the front windshield. Then they hurried past me to find a seat in the back on the left, where they, too, could poke their heads out the window and marvel.
“What do you think it is?” said the guy sitting in the seat behind mine.
I glanced at him to make sure he was talking to me. We’d never really talked before, but we seemed to have a similar schedule. I saw him a lot. On the bus, anyway. He had unkempt, greasy hair and a ten o’clock shadow. His fingers were always dirty, like a mechanic’s or a mine worker’s, and he had them curled around the window’s ledge, giving him leverage to poke his head out the opening and look sharply to the right, toward the front of the bus.
The UFO was visible at maybe five degrees to the left of the bus’s trajectory, and it popped in and out of view, above shorter and between taller buildings.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve only been here a couple months.” Some of that time had been spent in training. But training hadn’t mentioned anything about UFOs. Of course, that didn’t mean much. Training hadn’t said much about much. “What do you think it is?”
“I’ve been here almost fifty years,” the guy said. He then told me his name was Adam, and he stuck his hand out the window. I told him my name was Corbin, and we shook outside the bus.
“Fifty years, almost,” he said, “and I’ve never seen anything in that sky. Not even the sun. But I tell you this much. If Management hasn’t shot it down yet, that’s saying something.”
“They can do that?” I asked. “Shoot something out of the sky?”
I hadn’t seen anything like guns in the City, let alone something with the necessary power to shoot that hovering thing down.
“Maybe not,” said Adam. “Maybe they catch it in a net and reel it in. Point is, if they wanted to do something, they would do something. They’d make a spectacle of it. A warning. The fact they haven’t…”
He shrugged, a sly little smile on his grubby face.
“What?” I asked. “What’s it mean that Management is just letting it sit there?”
“Exactly,” Adam said with a conspiratorial nod. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”