Dan Rhodes Mysteries

Jeanne Clinton was a pretty and well-liked woman, though in her younger days, she'd been known to be a bit wild. But she married an older man and settled down to a quiet, respectable life. Now, she is dead...brutally murdered in her home. Dan Rhodes, the thoughtful, hard-working sheriff of Blacklin County, Texas, has enough to worry about already: a rash of burglaries in town and an election coming up against a hot-shot opponent. Now, he's got to find a killer among the residents of his little town - a wily killer, bound and determined not to be caught.

Sheriff Dan Rhodes knows it's going to be a bad day when Bert Ramsey arrives at the jail with a neatly wrapped arm and lays it on Dan's desk. He has another out in the truck, he tells the sheriff, and "a couple of legs, too, but they don't match up". Then Bert Ramsey is shot to death, and serious crime takes over. A tattoo on the body discloses that Ramsey was once a member of Los Muertos, a violent motorcycle gang from the city, and current members of the gang turn up in Blacklin County.

In tiny Blacklin County, Texas, a curse is nothing more than a four-letter word hollered in a barroom or muttered in the heat. So Sheriff Dan Rhodes is more curious than concerned when he dutifully responds to a complaint of witchcraft. When Dr. Samuel Martin, the local dentist - and unpopular landlord - claims he's been hexed by a tenant, Rhodes does his best to smooth things out between the distressed D.D.S. and the would-be witch. But in two shakes of a black cat's tail, the good doctor disappears...and his wife turns up bludgeoned to death.

Someone in Blacklin County, Texas, is being disrespectful of the dead, and Sheriff Dan Rhodes must put a stop to it. First, there's the matter of the bodies at Ballinger's Funeral Home and the apparent misplacing of their valuables; the bereaved are beside themselves. There'd best be immediate action, or the bell could toll again - this time, for Sheriff Dan's reputation as the guardian of justice and decency in these parts.

In this latest Sheriff Dan Rhodes adventure, Bill Crider sends the small-town Texas lawman to investigate the apparent theft of a set of false teeth from one of the elderly residents of the Sunny Dale Nursing Home. The case, which begins as one merely embarrassing ("Ah ain't got no TEEF!") quickly turns serious when the owner of the missing dentures, one Lloyd Bobbit, is found suffocated with a plastic grocery bag.

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.

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.

While all of Blacklin County, Texas, celebrates the first winning season of high-school football in years, Sherliff Dan Rhodes finds himself dealing with drunken festivities, fights, and the murder of the team's offensive coach.

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.

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.