Sheriff Bo Tully

When the call comes in that Mike Wilson, the unlikable owner of West Branch Lodge, has gone missing, Sheriff Tully is delighted. This is an excellent opportunity for Tully, his tracker pal Dave, and his retired sheriff father, Pap, to enjoy a few evenings of hot tubs and single-malt scotch at the luxurious lodge while working the case. However, visions of R & R vanish in a flash on the drive up, when Tully and Pap suddenly realize an avalanche is thundering down the mountain, straight toward them. Tully manages to outrun the crush of snow, but the road behind is blocked, and there's no telling for how long. Tully's stranded at the lodge with a motley group of vacationers and locals: a sassy co-ed, a group of rambunctious fraternity boys, a shadowy group of what looks like ex-cons, the missing owner's wife, a suspiciously good-looking bartender, and worst (or perhaps best) of all, Tully's old flame, who shows up with her dogsled and naughty intentions. Both vacationers and locals start to look like suspects when Tully discovers startling evidence proving that the avalanche was no accident of nature. But why would anybody want him dead? And then the missing persons case turns into a murder case when Mike Wilson's body turns up in the river a couple of days later.

Sheriff Bo Tully is the kind of western lawman who's as good with the ladies as he is with his guns, and he never lets a death threat get in the way of a good barbecue. He's a man with a sense of humor, which comes in handy when trying to establish order in Blight County. In this latest tale, Tully pursues a seventy-five-year-old missing persons case in which a pair of gold miners (a two-man drilling team known as a double-jack) mysteriously disappeared just as they hit the mother lode in a remote part of Blight County. Meanwhile, a second, more threatening case looms large. After serving only two months of a life sentence, a mentally unstable murderer named Kincaid-a nasty piece of work if there ever was one-manages to escape prison, setting his sights on killing the man who put him behind bars: one Sheriff Bo Tully. In an effort to lead his would-be killer into the open, and also to do a little gold prospecting and fishing while he's at it, Tully heads north with his ex-sheriff father, Pap, and his friend and expert tracker, Dave. As the two cases play themselves out, Sheriff Tully finds himself hunting down one murderer who's probably long dead, and being hunted by another who's very much alive.

Award-winning humorist Patrick F. McManus delivers a funny and folksy whodunit from his popular Sheriff Bo Tully series. Hoping for a pleasant day of picking huckleberries, Sheriff Tully instead finds himself investigating a triple homicide and the disappearance of a local rancher.