The Gun Also Rises

The Aaron Tucker Mystery series (For Whom the Minivan Rolls, A Farewell to Legs, As Dog is My Witness) delighted readers with the hero's New Jersey wit and stable family life. Aaron, a work-at-home dad and freelance reporter, is trying to become a success at screenwriting while living 3,000 miles away from Hollywood. His wife Abby is an attorney and his children, Ethan (who has Asperger's Syndrome) and Leah are the focus of his life. But people keep asking him to investigate crimes.

In this short story--the first in the series, which originally appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine--Aaron is slightly younger than in the books, and Ethan has not yet been diagnosed with AS. But Aaron, ever the advocate for his son, is still dealing with a problem: Ethan has been framed for a heinous crime (bringing a water pistol to his first grade class). And Aaron is determined to find out which little swine is implicating his son.

Meanwhile, the editor of a baseball magazine asks Aaron to look into the mysterious death of a minor league pitcher in his area. At the bottom of a celebratory pile-up after winning the championship game, a player died, but no one is sure why. And the more Aaron pokes around, the more he thinks something is very wrong.

Fans of the series will find most of their favorite characters represented, and new readers will have no problem getting involved in the escapades of Aaron Tucker--husband, father, screenwriter, freelance reporter, and overall wiseass.