Epilogue For Murder
A Bennett Cole Mystery
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Famous mystery novelist Walker Redgrave is dead, an apparent suicide in a dingy motel room in a roughneck fishing village on the Panhandle coast of Florida. Atlanta private detective—and former college professor—Bennett Cole is reading the jolting headlines when Redgrave’s widow walks into his office. Redgrave could not have taken his own life, she says. He had plans, too much to live for.
So Cole takes his first big case after more than nine years of peeping through windows and following errant spouses during late-night trysts. From the news accounts, it appears clear-cut that the novelist took his own life. The room was locked, the gun still in his cold hand.
But this is no open-and-shut case, and, as Cole comes to realize, there is a lot more to Redgrave’s “suicide” than is contained in the police reports. Cole’s search for the truth leads him deep into the Florida backwoods, to places rarely touched by the law, and where men will kill to hid any number of secrets.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Setting his debut in the Florida panhandle, Shriner enters--and holds his own in--a crime territory staked out by a number of acknowledged masters. Emulating his fictional heroes, Atlanta ex-academic Bennett Cole has traded his ivory-tower existence for the life of a shamus. Investigating the purported suicide--by a gunshot wound in a locked hotel room--of his favorite crime writer, Bennett lands knee-deep in redneck lowlife in the backwater Florida town of Steinhatchee. There he befriends the ambitious waitress at the local bar and her smooth-talking boss, aggravates the local chief of police and runs afoul of a monosyllabic father and his two less than lovable sons, all three of whom are mean, stupid and reeking of criminality. While some of Shriner's characters don't develop much beyond bare-bones caricature, the police chief and believably inept Bennett, often terrified for his life, are fully fleshed out. Like much Florida crime fiction, this work has environmental subplots running through it. A hint of continuing romance with one of the local residents promises a fine wrinkle for the next in the series.
