i started it but couldnt get into it. there was a sheriff and some lady was killed in the beauty shop, then the man down the block was killed too. i just skimmed the rest, he was chasing some people that didnt have anything to do with it, questioning others. it wasnt very exciting and i found i w...
Bill Crider is back with a mystery novel combining his wry wit, a clever plot, and the usual hijinks--all set against the normally placid backdrop of academia. First, someone steals several valuable toy soldiers from the collection of the dean of a small liberal arts school. The dean asks Carl Bu...
Dr. Sally Good, chair of the Department of English at Hughes Community College has learned how to cope with the many minor disasters and a couple of major ones, including a murder, that have cropped up since her tenure. Right now, however, her only worry is about her own behavior. She's just viol...
One hot summer morning, big, tough Bud Turley brings an enormous tooth into the Blacklin County police station and asks Sheriff Dan Rhodes to keep it for him until the paleontologist from the community college comes up to examine it. Turley insists that the tooth is proof that Bigfoot roams the w...
Blacklin County, Texas, Sheriff Dan Rhodes investigates a crime wave of emu-rustling and a murder that may be related to the theft of the valuable birds. By the author of Booked for a Hanging.
Sally's husband has been dead for eight years; his remote ancestor, the witch Sarah Good, died on the scaffold in Salem more than four hundred years ago. Yet the president of Sally's college is afraid the story will reflect on the institution. Sally is annoyed. Sarah Good wasn't her ancestor; s...
#8 in the Sheriff Dan Rhodes series. In small town Texas "Friday Night Lights", Rhodes is the man in the middle as the pressure to solve a murder conflicts with the pressure not to disrupt the football schedule.Dan Rhodes series - Football fever has swept Clearview, Texas. Probably the only citiz...
"Shotgun Saturday Night" is the second Dan Rhodes mystery by Bill Crider following "Too Late To Die". The Book was published in 1987 and gives the reader the next installment of the events in the small town in Blacklin County, Texas.Sheriff Dan Rhodes has hired a new deputy to replace the last on...
The versatile mystery novelist Bill Crider has created a pantheon of marvelous characters, but none is more real, warm, and thoroughly delightful than Sheriff Dan Rhodes of Claflin County, Texas. In his sixth adventure, Rhodes is confronted with what seems at first to be a suicide: the body of a ...
Crimes Galore Ghosts, cemeteries ransacked, the wrong body in an open grave, Sheriff Dan Rhodes has more than enough things to investigate. The plot is ingenious and the sheriff follows false trails and suffers injuries before he solves all of the problems. Through it all he keeps his good humor ...
Texas Sheriff Dan Rhodes' cases usually concern the bad boys of rural Blacklin County, or the slightly wacky citizens who are causing trouble that tends to be funny rather than criminal. But although at first the dead man floating in the old swimming pool at the edge of town seems to have been an...
The politically correct agenda of the new dean of Hartley Gorman College brings a great deal of controversy to the campus, but the murder of a popular professor is first and foremost on the minds of the faculty and students. Between his academic duties and struggling personal life, Professor Carl...
This is a great example of the pure PI type mystery. Truman Smith has backed away from investigations after spending a year looking for his missing sister. His rich, old high school friend pulls him back into detecting when he asks Tru for a big favor--find his un acknowledged daughter born to ...
Galveston p.i. Truman Smith, as reluctant as ever, takes on the search for a missing college student, even though Smith has bad memories of his missing persons cases. Still, when Dino asks, Tru listens.The missing person is a boy who went on spring break and never came home. Right now it appears ...
Strangers are moving into Blacklin County, and none of them is any stranger than Seepy Benton, a math teacher whom the county judge suspects is a wild-eyed radical. Benton and Max Schwartz, who has opened a music store, are among the students in the Citizens’ Sheriff’s Academy, which seemed like ...
She really needed to grade them. Her students were beginning to wonder if they were ever going to get them back. But Sally couldn’t get her mind off the murders. She could understand the way Weems and Desmond were thinking; Ralph Thompson, enraged by what had happened, killed his wife and then we...
She told him that she was going to eat at Max’s Place. “It has a great salad bar,” she said, “and Seepy doesn’t sing there at noon.” “That’s something in its favor,” Rhodes said, “but I have a few things to do. I’ll eat later.” Mary smiled at him. “Some other time, then,” she said and went on her...
I had to drive practically the length of the Island to get home, and by the time I got to the house I was thoroughly chilled. I parked the Jeep and looked around for Nameless. He wasn't in sight, and he didn't come when I called. Probably out terrorizing the lizards that lived in the bushes. &...
It was past time for his visit with the Packers, and he wanted to get on the road. He told Ruth to follow him. He wanted backup, since you could never be sure what might be waiting for you when you went to the Packers’ place.The Packers all lived out a mile or so from the tiny town of Obert on do...
HE’D PLANNED TO EAT AND then go by and talk to Mikey Burns, but when he took the bullets by the jail and put them in the evidence locker, Hack told him that he had other things to do. Like going to Wal-Mart for the book signing.“I had to send Ruth out there for crowd control,” Hack said. “Cars al...
Some of them had a rudimentary grasp of sentence structure, and could even write a compound sentence on demand. But it was likely to be something like one of her favorites, “Bill have him a coat, but I be cold.” It was a compound sentence. There was no way to get around it. Others had a better co...
he had told Rhodes once. “The one Clyde Ballinger bought out. But maybe not. They might be older than that.”No matter how old they were, they were bent and scratched, with legs that were just slightly out of line so that not a single chair sat quite level on the floor.The floor itself wasn’t e...
The stores were open late, and the streets were crowded. The cotton farmers all came to town on Saturday, and it wasn’t easy to find a parking place on the streets in front of the stores. That had all changed now. The streetlights still came on when the sun went down, but the streets were deserte...
Rhodes could no longer hear the squirrel or the blue jay. Even the wind disappeared and the leaves on the trees seemed frozen in place. It was as if someone had thrown a switch and stopped time.Then the switch was flipped again and all the sounds flooded back, but there was one other sound, somet...
He realized that he didn’t know a lot more than he did. He knew that Jeff Tyler had been Lynn’s late appointment. He knew that her purse had been found in the trash behind Tyler’s antique store, so there was a nice connection. Except that Rhodes found it hard to believe Tyler would be so stupid a...
Rhodes said.“The Lord has blessed us,” Brother Alton said. “To a certain extent.”The preacher was lean and lanky and, unlike his church, hadn’t changed a bit since his last encounter with Rhodes. He was wearing what appeared to be the very same black suit, the same wide black tie, and the same ...
“Neil’s dead?” Rhodes nodded. Vicki didn’t seem to be unhappy about it. “Who did it?” she asked after a second or two. “I was hoping you might be able to help me with that,” Rhodes said. “Maybe you know someone who might want to kill him.” “I didn’t go out with him that much,” Vicki said. “Just a...
The sun woke Willie Turner, shining under the brim of his hat and hitting him right in the eyes. It had been doing that a lot more lately, and he was a little worried about it. A man of his age ought not to be sleeping outside all night without even a blanket. Wasn't good for the bones. It took...
HIS SHIRTS AND pants were hung in the narrow closet, and sitting on the floor beneath them was a cloth duffel bag. In the room itself, there were no clothes flung on chair backs or lying on the floor. The bed was made, and there wasn’t a single wrinkle on the bedspread.There was a dresser against...
Then he drove out toward Arvid Fowler’s place, thinking all the way about spirituality and the Eccles cousins. It hadn’t been too long since Rhodes had experienced something strange with some turtles, something he’d never mentioned to Benton and never would. It had been close enough to a mystical...
They didn’t need the flashlights. “Hunter’s moon,” Andy said. “Or close to it. I don’t think whoever named it that had hunting burglars in mind, though.” The night air was turning cool, and Rhodes wished he’d brought a jacket. “Better burglars than hogs,” he said. “You think they’ll be armed?” “T...