THROWING SHADOWS

A series of murders in a forest with a historically bad reputation gives Branson County, Missouri, Sheriff Hank Worth and his team all they can handle.

Hank has been dealing with family problems ever since his mother-in-law was murdered and he had to consider his father-in-law a suspect. When a motorist finds a hiker, Mingo Culver, raving in the road, Deputy Sam Karnes steps in to question him about the corpse he claims to have seen in the woods. Sam thinks he knows what the man is raving about. There’s a local spot known as Murder Rocks; most recently a hangout for local teens, during the Civil War it was a place where travelers moving north through the area were attacked, robbed, and murdered by infamous bushwacker Alf Bolin. The site has long been rumored to contain Bolin’s buried treasure, and although people have searched for it before, the podcast Hidden Hoards has unleashed a sudden influx of treasure seekers looking for a cache of gold larger than anyone had suspected. Hank and Sam find a bloody hatchet, but it takes dogs to find the body, which turns out to be two bodies. Both belong to people who were apparently searching the woods, and both their backpacks are missing. Hank’s chief deputy, Sheila Turley, a computer wizard, is tracing the background of the legend and all those podcast fans, some of whom are well-prepared researchers and others treasure-seeking amateurs wandering the woods. Although the treasure hunters might seem to have greater cause to kill their competition, Hank thinks the situation is much more complicated.

A well-done police procedural whose historical background provides extra interest.