Murder By

A Lincoln Continental driven by Amy Steele, wife of millionaire rancher, James Steele, rams a tanker full of gasoline. Instant incineration of both drivers; a probable accident, according to Sergeant Larry Jenner of the Amarillo Police Department. Eight months later, it's murder, according to Sergeant Ed Schroder of the Special Crimes Unit, and the probable murderer is the widower. Standing between James Steele and Sergeants Jenner and Schroder is John Lloyd Branson, reputed to be the best criminal defense attorney in Texas. In his formal three-piece suits, cowboy boots, Phi Beta Kappa key, he is certainly the most eccentric attorney. Assisted by his legal clerk, Lydia Fairchild, John Lloyd must prove that the most unlikely, indeed the most impossible, suspect is a cold-blooded murderer.

At first glance, he was a fine figure of a man. Even the butcher knife buried in the middle of his chest didn't seriously detract from his good looks. But that corpse, nude except for a pair of mismatched socks – and the butcher knife, of course – is trouble with a capital T for Leroy MacPherson, in whose wheat field the body is dumped, and rest of his extended family. It's also trouble for the opponents of the nuclear waste depository the DOE plans to build in the Texas Panhandle. The victim is Charlton Price-Leigh III, whose job it is – or was – to persuade local residents that burying radioactive waste in their backyards presented very little danger. That's not what MacPhearson and his neighbors believe, and it's not what attorney John Lloyd Branson believes either. When John Lloyd and his legal clerk, Lydia Fairchild, take on MacPhearson's defense, they find themselves entangled in a series of deceptions. Whatever they see, whatever a witness says, cannot be trusted. Even the victim cannot be trusted.

The cops have dubbed him "The Boulevard Butcher." His calling cards are a written invitation and a taste for mutilation. His prey are the prostitutes plying their trade on the night streets of the Texas panhandle's sleaziest district. With his usual brilliant aplomb-and the eager assistance of lovely law student Lydia Fairchild - Branson finds a familiar method in the madness: that of one of history's most notorious serial killers. And if Branson's hunch is right, the last murder will be the most unspeakable. Unless Branson can set a trap using Lydia as bait...

It's no Halloween trick when mild-mannered Brad Hemphill - curator of the Texas Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum - materializes in a museum display in the dead of night. The meek young man is as dead as the dinosaur skeleton he's perched upon. While local legend says the museum is haunted by the spirit of a pioneer woman, only a human hand could have swung the blunt object that cracked the curator's skull. But as the police interrogate the eccentric museum staff in search of who?, peerless attorney John Lloyd Branson seeks to uncover the killer by asking why? The only thing missing from the carefully planned, cold-blooded crime is a motive. No one had reason to want poor Brad Hemphill dead... At least no visible reason. So, with the aid of Lydia Fairchild, his trusted legal assistant, the flamboyant Branson undertakes his own investigation - scaring up ghosts from the past and rattling family skeletons as he zeroes in on a secret so shocking it's worth killing for...