My BOOKS
Long Autumn
Andy Armitage, sheriff of Lowell County in the rural Midwest, is experiencing disarray in his personal life. His girlfriend, Anita Eaton, is unfaithful. Claire Letterman, a young lady from the town where he attended college, asks him to submit a DNA sample to confirm his paternity. His dispatcher sets him up on a blind date that devolves into a nightmare. Thank goodness things are uneventful in the county. Until a woman’s badly decomposed body turns up at a makeshift dumpsite.
Two weeks after the body is discovered, Andy has little more than an extensive list of interviews that produced no leads. The only thing resembling a lead is the disappearance of the victim’s boyfriend shortly after she died. The single suspect Andy has is a self-employed exterminator with a disturbing profile, but even he has no discernable motive.
The good news is that Andy’s personal life has taken a turn for the better. Anita wants to get back together. He starts to treasure his relationship with Claire. And he meets Charlotte Burke, a nursing home administrator who rekindles suppressed emotions in Andy.
Ancestral Voices
Clayton Reed is on probation from the state Bureau of Investigation. A crusader with a penchant for meting out his own justice, he is temporarily exiled to his home county to investigate a routine drowning. But the routine drowning turns out to be a murder, and the murder turns out to be one in a series of homicides spanning nearly a decade. After all the standard motives and suspects are eliminated, Reed eventually discovers some unusual facts about the region where the murders have been committed. From an undiscovered treasure of Hernando De Soto, to a government conspiracy theory on the evacuation of essential federal personnel out of Washington D. C., Reed begins to hone in on a modern-day megalomaniac following ancestral voices.
