THE SOFT SPOT IS LIVE! KINDLE! PAPERBACK!

The Soft Spot looked clean.

White paper on the tables. Hot coffee. Desserts under glass. A respectable little restaurant tucked behind a theater.

That was the front of the house.

Vinny DeCarlo learned what was behind it before his first shift was over.

The owner smiled while problems disappeared. The chef ruled the kitchen through fear. Regulars put their hands where they didn’t belong. Waitresses cried in service stations, fixed their faces, and went right back to pouring coffee.

Nobody stopped anything.

They managed it.

Just enough to keep the restaurant open for another shift. 

Then the customers went home.

The doors locked.

Beer came out. Cocaine hit the tables. Affairs stopped pretending to be secrets. People disappeared into storage rooms and back halls while everyone else learned when not to look.

The restaurant had a soft spot in the floor.

It had a lot more than one. 

Vinny watches all of it and tells himself the same thing over and over:

I’m different.

He is disgusted by the men who hurt people and the people who let them get away with it. He hates the silence. The excuses. The smiles afterward.

And when somebody crosses a line, Vinny wants him to answer for it.

At first, that sounds almost noble.

Then Vinny starts looking for lines to cross.

A stranger mouths off. A bottle finds bone. Somebody frightens a waitress, and Vinny borrows her fear as an excuse to hurt him. The anger he used to leave at work starts following him through Stamford—and eventually Vinny realizes the restaurant is not turning him into anything.

It is giving the worst part of him a place to practice.  

Only Hannah seems to understand what is happening.

She tries to keep Vinny from the room.

Then she tries to keep the room from Vinny.

She cannot do both. 

Every shift gets uglier.

Every excuse gets easier.

And eventually Vinny stops waiting for somebody else to clean the place up.

By then, the doors are locked.

The lights are out.

And everybody still inside The Soft Spot is about to find out what Vinny has been practicing for.

The Soft Spot is a dark psychological thriller about complicity, rage, corruption, violence, and a man who convinces himself that being disgusted by monsters means he cannot become one.

Some rooms are not haunted.

They are staffed.