Why Picketsville’s first Jewish sheriff is hellbent on a church wedding is just one of the mysteries that doesn’t get solved...
Sheriff Ike Schwartz and his longtime love, college president Ruth Harris, have to plan their wedding reception around a couple of corpses.
Their nightmarish trip to Maine (Scone Island, 2012) has left Ike and Ruth in desperate need of relaxation. After one particularly well-lubricated evening in Vegas, however, the pair wakes up with joint hangovers as well as foggy memories of the Budding Rose Wedding Chapel. Too ashamed to admit they’re already hitched, they slink home and badger Picketsville’s Episcopal priest, the Rev. Blake Fisher, into blessing their civil union in a public ceremony fit to celebrate the ultimate union of town and gown. But Andy Lieux’s dog throws a hitch into their getting hitched by digging up not one but two dead bodies in the woods by the old spring. The first is Ethyl Smut, a skanky meth-head who locals agree should have been put out of her misery long ago. The second turns up in the FBI’s dental files as Tony Barbarini, a mobster supposedly sent to Davy Jones’ locker years ago by a couple of thugs named Johnny Murphy and Alphonse Damato. This little discrepancy sends federal agent Karl Hedrick, formerly Ike’s deputy, scrambling back to Picketsville. Even with Karl’s help, the investigation stalls. Worst of all, Darla Smut, the one person who might know who killed her mom, disappears, and Ike knows that if he doesn’t find Darla fast, deadly dangerous drug dealer George LeBrun just might beat him to her.
Why Picketsville’s first Jewish sheriff is hellbent on a church wedding is just one of the mysteries that doesn’t get solved in Ramsay’s otherwise highly entertaining ninth.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4642-0214-8
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”
Once again, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett gets mixed up in a killing whose principal suspect is his old friend Nate Romanowski, whose attempts to live off the grid keep breaking down in a series of felony charges.
If Judge Hewitt hadn’t bent over to pick up a spoon that had fallen from his dinner table, the sniper set up nearly a mile from his house in the gated community of the Eagle Mountain Club would have ended his life. As it was, the victim was Sue Hewitt, leaving the judge alive and free to rail and threaten anyone he suspected of the shooting. Incoming Twelve Sleep County Sheriff Brendan Kapelow’s interest in using the case to promote his political ambitions and the judge’s inability to see further than his nose make them the perfect targets for a frame-up of Nate, who just wants to be left alone in the middle of nowhere to train his falcons and help his bride, Liv Brannon, raise their baby, Kestrel. Nor are the sniper, the sheriff, and the judge Nate’s only enemies. Orlando Panfile has been sent to Wyoming by the Sinaloan drug cartel to avenge the deaths of the four assassins whose careers Nate and Joe ended last time out (Wolf Pack, 2019). So it’s up to Joe, with some timely data from his librarian wife, Marybeth, to hire a lawyer for Nate, make sure he doesn’t bust out of jail before his trial, identify the real sniper, who continues to take an active role in the proceedings, and somehow protect him from a killer who regards Nate’s arrest as an unwelcome complication. That’s quite a tall order for someone who can’t shoot straight, who keeps wrecking his state-issued vehicles, and whose appalling mother-in-law, Missy Vankeuren Hand, has returned from her latest European jaunt to suck up all the oxygen in Twelve Sleep County to hustle some illegal drugs for her cancer-stricken sixth husband. But fans of this outstanding series will know better than to place their money against Joe.
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53823-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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