Showing results by publisher "Crossroad Press" in Police Procedurals

Special investigator Whit Pynchon and crime reporter Annie Tyson-Tyree race against time to find the psychotic killer who is murdering the wives and girlfriends of all the cops in the small West Virginia town of Millbrook.

An interrupted burglary on a peaceful Milbrook street ends in the stabbing of a citizen and the murder of a cop. And that's only the beginning of a criminal nightmare for special investigator Whit Pynchon. Whit has good reason to believe that the bloody B. & E. is the latest in a rash of break-ins committed for the same reason: to steal firearms. Even worse, the culprits may be neo-Nazi terrorists, who rove through small towns like Milbrook, committing robberies as part of a larger, more treacherous plan.

Although at first the dead man floating in the old swimming pool at the edge of town seems to have been an accident victim - a staggering drunk tumbling into the water - Rhodes and his small but colorful staff soon uncover murder. It's the second strange death in two weeks (the other was that of John West, killed when he blew up carrying a gasoline can across a field). But where was the Cherokee wagon John was carrying the gas to? And why is his widow so jaunty? West was a solid citizen; Pep Yeldell, the swimming pool decedent, was a man with many enemies.

For an officer of the law, Blacklin County, Texas, used to be pretty peaceful, but now, what with the emu-rustling, cockfights, and protests at the new Wal-Mart store — not to mention murder — Sheriff Dan Rhodes has his hands full. Hit hard by the collapse of his little hardware store, Elijah ("Lige") Ward has taken to chaining himself to the Wal-Mart doors and generally making a nuisance of himself. And when Lige's dead body turns up, floating down a river in a portable toilet, Rhodes finds he has quite a case to investigate.

In his sixth adventure, Rhodes is confronted with what seems at first to be a suicide: the body of a man newly arrived in the county is found hanged in the dilapidated building he has taken over for his business. Simon Graham was a rare-book dealer. If it seems unlikely to find such an arcane entrepreneur in this extremely rural and sparsely populated part of Texas, it becomes less strange when it turns out that Graham was more con man than bibliophile.

Sheriff Dan Rhodes has half a mind to shoot the next person who asks if it’s hot enough for him, what with the near hundred-degree heat and a months-long drought. He’s also a bit warm under the collar over an ambitious local reporter’s allegations of corruption in the local county commissioner’s office—accusations that include him as well.

FBI Special Agent Patti Moreland knows nothing about baseball, but she must uncover who’s leaving a trail of bodies outside of stadiums in New York and New Jersey, and why. Each body comes with a note demanding the league commissioner reverse the call that ruined an ultra-rare perfect game, or more people die—including a player close to the investigation who’s vanished and has less than thirty-six hours to live if the commissioner doesn’t buckle.

In this tenth installment of the Sheriff Dan Rhodes series, the Blacklin County Texas law enforcer is back to solve even more mysteries. Some of the most amusing sequences in Crider's Blacklin county mysteries are set in the jailhouse, and star the ongoing word battles between its two septuagenarian denizens, Hack the dispatcher and Lawton, the jailer. This time no one at the jailhouse is laughing and Rhodes has a new problem. Not only is the jailhouse itself rumored to be haunted, but a mysterious corpse is found in an open grave in the neighboring town.