Pete Brady Mystery

His career in shambles, a newspaperman looks for a new start in rural Louisiana. Pete Brady is in a bar on Magazine Street, halfway through his third Manhattan, when he gets a message from the New Orleans underworld. In response to Pete's recent investigation into drug trafficking, they have sent him a message: slitting his favorite source's throat, ear to ear. Even a Pulitzer Prize can't get that image out of Pete's head, and so he bolts, moving to desolate Troy, Louisiana, where he buys a failing newspaper and tries to turn it into a force for good. But death is not through with Pete Brady. While tidying the graves in the local churchyard, a group of society ladies discover the body of Frieda Troy MacBride, gossip columnist, whose acid tongue has finally gotten her killed. As he struggles to keep his little paper from going under, Brady must unmask this small-town slayer before every writer on staff meets the same fate.

An old convict returns to Troy and sends Brady's newsroom into chaos. As he was driven to Angola, Cory Wilde prayed his torment was just a dream. But the murder was real, and so was his sentence: twenty-nine years working the sugar cane fields in one of the nation's cruelest prisons. When he is finally released, he is an old man, drained of every drop of life that once made him such a terror, but his name still has the power to make the people sweat in Troy, Louisiana. At first Pete Brady, the new owner of the town's weekly newspaper, doesn't understand why his readers are so afraid of this broken old man. The original case against Wilde, whose life was spared despite the fact that he committed a capital crime, raises questions Brady cannot answer. Chasing this story could mean a lynch mob whose sights are set not just on the old man, but on Brady himself.

When a young boy is implicated in a murder, Brady goes hunting for the real killer. In Pete Brady's new hometown, hunting is a religion, and he is expected to convert if he's to run the local newspaper. When Sheriff Garitty takes his son out for his first hunt, he invites Pete to join them in the deer stand - a drafty, miserable place that would be unbearable if young Scotty weren't so excited. Pete is staring down his rifle barrel, trying to decide if he has the nerve to kill a deer, when a shot rings out. The boy has hit his target. But when they go to retrieve the kill, they find it isn't a deer, but a man. Scotty has trained his whole life for this moment, and Pete can't believe he would have mistaken a man - even a drunk like Dwayne Elkins - for an animal. To clear the boy's name, Brady goes in search of an ingenious killer, and soon finds himself in the crosshairs.