Who is Cal Brink?
Fictional former private investigator turned real estate agent.
Author’s Opening Note
August is going to be a working month away from the keyboard. I will be attending Killer Nashville, some travel, and editor revisions on Notice of Assignment when they land around the 14th. I'll be back in September with new Cal Brink Files content and updates on the October release. Thanks for being here.
Cal Brink – Fictional protagonist
Cal believes in the Golden Rule. Well, as best as any human can pull it off. He was raised in Kansas, went to church every Sunday and attended Boy Scouts. Married at twenty-one to Shawna, the two set off for Washington, DC seeking thrills and prestige but wound up working four jobs at the same time, between them.
A botched robbery and a witness stepping in from the shadows led him to being a private investigator and process server and to a life he never knew existed. Broken marriages. Financial fraud. Skip Tracing. Cal saw it all through a long lens.
After Davis, their only child, was born, he started looking for a more domestic life. A life that wasn’t predicated on watching other lives fall apart. Cal and Shawna packed up and returned to Kansas City.
A few employment misfires led to Cal getting his real estate license, where he excelled applying the same investigative techniques to finding houses, clients, and trouble.
Always some kind of trouble.
Facts
Born: 1965
University of Kansas: 1983-1986
Married: 1986
PI in DC: 1986-1995
Davis born: 1992
Photographer: 1994-2003
Kansas & Missouri real estate agent: 2002-present
Current residence: Olathe, KS
Hobbies: KU Basketball, Sporting KC, and live music
Published Crime Fiction by The Cal Brink Files
Charlie Had a Dinosaur: A Cal Brink Files origin short story
$0.99 on Amazon | Free to download here
Cal Brink wasn’t looking to be a private investigator. For most, a robbery attempt is traumatic. For Cal, it was a job interview. A witness with a gun stepped out of the shadows and made Cal a job offer. For fifty bucks, Cal took the offer and walked into an apartment he hadn’t been invited to.
A little boy’s momma was happy with Cal’s decision. Shawna, his new bride, had other ideas.
Charlie Had a Dinosaur is a Twenty-Minute Thriller and the origin story of Cal Brink — a man who didn’t choose the life. The life chose him.
Coming Case Files
Notice of Assignment: A Cal Brink Real Estate Thriller
A Kansas City crime fiction novella currently in professional editing
Release date to be late-October 2026
Be notified. Get first four chapters here
In August 2010, Kansas City real estate agent Cal Brink buys a distressed property in Columbus Park for $29,000 and figures the hardest part will be the renovation. He figures wrong.
Behind a basement wall he finds a silver box containing a revolver, a photograph, and a cassette tape, evidence that connects him to a surveillance job he did in Washington, DC, twenty-two years earlier and to a murder he didn’t commit but may have caused.
Within forty-eight hours someone has torn apart his house looking for what he found. By Monday, he has his family hidden away, driven 1,080 miles, and is walking back into a world he thought he had left behind.
The document that started all of it was the last one he signed at closing. He didn’t read it.