Sheriff Dan Rhodes

Everyone knew her. A lot of them like her. One of them killed her.Jeanne Clinton was a pretty and well-liked womanthough 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 towna wily killer, bound and determined not to be caught.The deeper Rhodes digs into the hearts and minds of his neighbors, the more secrets he turned up...and the more violence he encounters. But Rhodes doesn't give up easily. And neither does the killer.

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.As if that weren't enough to contend with, yet another body tumbles into Sheriff Dan's pathout of a closet this time, and trussed up in most unsavory fashion. More disrespect, but obviously a separate case from the funeral home. Or is it?Meanwhile, with Hack Jensen and his sidekick Lawton (more comic than cop team) minding the jail, thank heavens there's Deputy Ruth Grady for backup. On the personal front, his fiance, Ivy Daniel, is supportive as always, but a mystery rears its perplexing head here as wellnamely, will Sheriff Dan propose or will he not?Tough questions on every side, and guess who's expected to come up with the answers before he gets carried away by Death On the Move?

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 Blacklin County, Texas. 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. The presumed suicide begins to look more and more like murder when several newcomers swoop down on the scene and try to beat out one another to find a reputedly valuable rare book that Graham was rumored to have among his collection of hardly worthwhile items. Although Rhodes's two attenuated and eccentric jailhouse employees have gone overboard for the magic of the department's new computer, the steady, if put-upon, Rhodes and his clear-eyed observations of human nature have invariably been more useful to the solution of a crime - and that is still true in the case of the hanged book dealer.

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.The prime suspect is a fellow Sunny Daler, Maurice Kennedy, who was known to have had no love for the cantankerous Bobbita feud that originated way, way back in the youth of the two men. Now Kennedy is missingbut is he the killer or another victim?Meanwhile, Rhodes and his two attenuated jailers have been hit with a lawsuit claiming dangerous and inhumane conditions at the local jail. There's not much of a case, considering that the town's best cook provides the prisoners' meals. With all that's going on, Rhodes scarcely has time to pay proper attention to his fortunately ever-patient fiance, Ivy Daniel.

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. Rhodes uses his laid back sleuthing skills to find the answers to these puzzling events, which Crider depicts with his usual humor, suspense and small town ambiance.

Scheming, bribery, dirty romance, and a dead county commissioner.Sheriff Dan Rhodes has half a mind to shoot the next person who asks if it's hot enough for him, what with the near hundred-degree heat and a months-long drought. He's also a bit warm under the collar over an ambitious local reporter's allegations of corruption in the local county commissioner's office-accusations that include him as well.Rhodes has no trouble clearing his own name, but manages to uncover some nasty business over at the commissioner's office. But when the charred body of the county commissioner is found among the ashes of his torched fishing cabin, Rhodes suspects July's fireworks are only getting started. Toss in some small scheming, bribery, and dirty romance, and it only goes to prove the seasoned lawman's tried-and-tested theory about murder: it always boils down to love or money. Sometimes both.

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."To Rhodes's relief, the severed limbspart of a large cache Bert has discovered while clearing brushare not evidence of a mass murderer at large in Blacklin County, but something more on a par with the usual emergencies the Texas lawman has to deal with: cows loose in the churchyard, ninety-year-old Mrs. Thurman's periodic attacks of "blindness" (which Rhodes cures by sending out a deputy with fresh light bulbs), and the like. Meanwhile, back at the jail, his attenuated employees are bristling about the new deputy, a highly qualified police officer, but a woman, and the air conditioner has collapsed during the heat wave. Plus his personal life has its own problems; does he or does he not want to marry Ivy Daniel?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. There are questions: Where did the town handyman get the money to buy two color television sets, two VCRs, and a houseful of new furniture? Not to mention six thousand dollars in cash rolled up in a sock in Bert's dresser drawer. Dan Rhodes doesn't have access to the high-tech detection methods of city policeand probably wouldn't use them if he had. Dan has to talk to people and sift the facts from the lies. If he is careful, he believes, and keeps it up, he'll usually get results. "Keeping it up" involves tangling with Wyneva Greer, Ramsey's former girlfriend now living with a mysterious newcomer to the town, Buster Cullens. Buster becomes the next murder victimof the same killer? Rhodes isn't sure. He soon tangles with the bikers, sustaining a certain amount of damage in the process.Dan Rhodes is, in the words of Newgate Callender of The New York Times Book Review, "a quiet man, an honest man and a stubborn man," and it seems that no amount of violence is going to deter him from getting to the bottom of the murders in his relatively peaceful and beautifully evoked Texas 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.For Rhodes, it means there's a bad moon rising over Blacklin County. And now he's got to do the voodoo he does best asking pointed questions and extracting the painful truth from some tight-lipped suspects who also bite...