Evan Wycliff Mysteries

A lapsed divinity student who is fascinated by astrophysics finds his best friend shot dead in a cornfield. It looks like suicide. Having returned to his farm roots near Lake of the Ozarks, Evan works as a skip tracer for the local car dealer. He learns his friend was involved in a dispute over farmland ownership that goes back two centuries - complicated now by plans to make an old weapons facility a tourist attraction.

2020 NYC Big Book Awards Distinguished Favorite in Mystery (plus three other awards for Evan Wycliff #1)Amateur sleuth Evan Wycliff is a disillusioned divinity student who is fascinated by astrophysics and given up both. He's returned to his small-town farm roots in Southern Missouri. He is also disappointed in love. His beautiful fiancé was a brilliant Jewish scientist, a defense contractor who was killed in a rocket attack in Syria. These days Evan gets guest preacher gigs and uses his investigative skills as skip tracer for the local car and tractor dealership. In this second novel in the series, Evan counsels a boy who is afflicted with schizophrenia and has been accused of rape. Along with related abuses of the child welfare system, he uncovers a teen trafficking ring run out of a luxury casino resort by a Russian oligarch.

The most controversial Preacher Wycliff mystery yet! Fourth in the multiple-award-winning mystery series A crazed scientist knocks on Evan's door with a bizarre warning - the Deep State may be planning to fake the Second Coming of Christ with advanced virtual-reality technology. Meanwhile, a faith-healing evangelist is luring poor and homeless people to a religious retreat with promises of ample food, then exhorting them to prepare for the End Times by starving themselves to death. Evan can't ignore these unbelievable stories when a young woman from his church disappears inside the cult leader's farm. Previous novels in the Evan Wycliff series have won 9 book awards, including Mystery Gold and Silver in the New York City Big Book Awards in the same year. PRAISE FOR THE EVAN WYCLIFF MYSTERIES This is literature masquerading as a mystery. Carefully yet powerfully, Gerald Jones creates a small, stunning world in a tiny midwestern town, infusing each character with not just life but wit, charm, and occasionally menace. This is the kind of writing one expects from John Irving or Jane Smiley. Marvin J. Wolf, author of the Rabbi Ben Mysteries, including A Scribe Dies in Brooklyn.