The job seems simple enough: Reporter Lee Hershey needs protection for a couple of weeks as he pursues the biggest story of his career with all eyes on swing state Ohio in the midst of a presidential election. Columbus private eye Andy Hayes, broke as usual, doesn’t have much choice but to sign on, even with his girlfriend falling for the charming journalist.
Then murder strikes at the Statehouse and Andy finds himself partly responsible for the death. With an innocent man behind bars, a mysterious vehicle following Andy around the city, and more lives in danger, the detective has his hands full trying to solve a killing in a poisonous political environment where everyone has a motive for murder and anyone could be the next target.
In Cast a Blue Shadow, his fourth Amish mystery, P. L. Gaus spins a suspenseful tale of power, pride, and tested faith. As always, Gaus explores the threshold of culture and faith among the Amish sects and their English neighbors, combining it here with the political divisions unique to the academic world.
After an early winter blizzard in Holmes County, Ohio, a wealthy socialite is found murdered in her mansion. That same morning, a troubled student, Martha Lehman, turns up at her psychiatrist’s office, bloody and unable to speak.
Professor Michael Branden and Sheriff Bruce Robertson begin an investigation that threatens to tear Millersburg College apart. Mute for many years as a child, Martha is once again unable (or unwilling) to speak. As Branden wrestles with the murder of the college’s leading benefactor, the real story of Martha Lehman begins to emerge—born Amish, converted to Mennonite, and drawn to the “English” world for the worst of reasons.
This new edition of Cast a Blue Shadow features an exclusive interview with the author, reading group materials, and a detailed map and driving guide to Holmes County, Ohio, with everything one needs to visit the iconic scenes depicted in the story.
In Cast a Blue Shadow, his fourth Amish mystery, P. L. Gaus spins a suspenseful tale of power, pride, and tested faith. As always, Gaus explores the threshold of culture and faith among the Amish sects and their English neighbors, combining it here with the political divisions unique to the academic world.
After an early winter blizzard in Holmes County, Ohio, a wealthy socialite is found murdered in her mansion. That same morning, a troubled student, Martha Lehman, turns up at her psychiatrist’s office, bloody and unable to speak.
Professor Michael Branden and Sheriff Bruce Robertson begin an investigation that threatens to tear Millersburg College apart. Mute for many years as a child, Martha is once again unable (or unwilling) to speak. As Branden wrestles with the murder of the college’s leading benefactor, the real story of Martha Lehman begins to emerge—born Amish, converted to Mennonite, and drawn to the “English” world for the worst of reasons.
This new edition of Cast a Blue Shadow features an exclusive interview with the author, reading group materials, and a detailed map and driving guide to Holmes County, Ohio, with everything one needs to visit the iconic scenes depicted in the story.
When attorney Lucinda Hayes reluctantly agrees to represent the mother of a brutally slain child, she must convince the court that the makers of a pornographic film are liable for the murder. As the case unfolds, Lucinda calls upon all her personal strength and legal talent, facing down her own ghosts as well as the powerful entertainment industry's star lawyers.
In Chilling Effect, Wesson affirms the power of free speech to inspire the best and the worst human behavior and explores the tension between freedom and accountability
Written in the tradition of Tony Hillerman, in Clouds without Rain, P. L. Gaus once again provides compelling intrigue and insight into Amish culture and tradition alongside contemporary American life.
In the wake of a fatal accident involving an Amish buggy and an eighteen-wheeler, Professor Michael Branden, working with the Holmes County Sheriff’s Department, becomes suspicious about the true nature of the crash. His suspicions only grow when the trustee of the dead man’s estate disappears a few days later.
Faced with Amish teenagers in goat masks robbing buggies on dusty lanes, land swindles involving out-of-town developers, several mysterious deaths, and the disappearance of a bank official, Branden realizes that there is far more to the story than a buggy crash on a sleepy country road.
This new edition of Clouds without Rain features an exclusive interview with the author, reading group materials, and a detailed map and driving guide to Holmes County, Ohio with everything one needs to visit the iconic scenes depicted in the story.
Written in the tradition of Tony Hillerman, in Clouds without Rain, P. L. Gaus once again provides compelling intrigue and insight into Amish culture and tradition alongside contemporary American life.
In the wake of a fatal accident involving an Amish buggy and an eighteen-wheeler, Professor Michael Branden, working with the Holmes County Sheriff’s Department, becomes suspicious about the true nature of the crash. His suspicions only grow when the trustee of the dead man’s estate disappears a few days later.
Faced with Amish teenagers in goat masks robbing buggies on dusty lanes, land swindles involving out-of-town developers, several mysterious deaths, and the disappearance of a bank official, Branden realizes that there is far more to the story than a buggy crash on a sleepy country road.
This new edition of Clouds without Rain features an exclusive interview with the author, reading group materials, and a detailed map and driving guide to Holmes County, Ohio with everything one needs to visit the iconic scenes depicted in the story.
After the bloodbath of Butcher’s Moon, the action-filled blowout Parker adventure, Donald Westlake said, "Richard Stark proved to me that he had a life of his own by simply disappearing. He was gone." And for nearly twenty-five years, he stayed away, while readers waited.
But nothing bad is truly gone forever, and Parker’s as bad as they come. According to Westlake, one day in 1997, “suddenly, he came back from the dead, with a chalky prison pallor”—and the resulting novel, Comeback, showed that neither Stark nor Parker had lost a single step. Knocking over a highly lucrative religious revival show, Parker reminds us that not all criminals don ski masks—some prefer to hide behind the wings of fallen angels.
The humor of Sherlock Holmes, Donald Westlake, Agatha Christie, Michael Innes, and Edmund Crispin are just a few of those discussed. A major point highlighted by this book is simply that wit, slapstick. laughter, and an anything-can-happen motif appear in a significant amount of fiction about crime.
When Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, Tony Hillerman’s oddly matched tribal police officers, patrol the mesas and canyons of their Navajo reservation, they join a rich traditon of Southwestern detectives. In Crime Fiction and Film in the Southwest, a group of literary critics tracks the mystery and crime novel from the Painted Desert to Death Valley and Salt Lake City. In addition, the book includes the first comprehensive bibliography of mysteries set in the Southwest and a chapter on Southwest film noir from Humphrey Bogart’s tough hood in The Petrified Forest to Russell Crowe’s hard-nosed cop in L.A. Confidential.
Although rarely distinguished from the detective story, the crime novel offers readers a quite different experience. In the detective novel, a sympathetic detective figure uses reason and intuition to solve the puzzle, restore order, and reassure readers that "right" will always prevail. In the crime novel, by contrast, the "hero" is either the killer, the victim, a guilty bystander, or someone falsely accused, and the crime may never be satisfactorily solved.
These and other fundamental differences are set out by Tony Hilfer in The Crime Novel, the first book that completely defines and explores this popular genre. Hilfer offers convincing evidence that the crime novel should be regarded as a genre distinct from the detective novel, whose conventions it subverts to develop conventions of its own.
Hilfer provides in-depth analyses of novels by Georges Simenon, Margaret Millar, Patricia Highsmith, and Jim Thompson. He also treats such British novelists as Patrick Hamilton, Shelley Smith, and Marie Belloc Lowndes, as well as the American novelists Cornell Woolrich, John Franklin Bardin, James M. Cain, and Fredric Brown. In addition, he defines the distinctions between the American crime novel and the British, showing how their differences correspond to differences in American and British detective fiction.
This well-written study will appeal to a general audience, as well as teachers and students of detective and mystery fiction. For anyone interested in the genre, it offers valuable suggestions of "what to read next."
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