Showing results by author "D. R. Meredith" in All Categories

When the mummified remains of a World War II GI are unearthed in the sub-basement of the Crawford County Courthouse, the residents, well-known for their nonstop gossip, are suddenly as quiet as the soldier's grave. Sheriff Charles Matthews is frustrated by the town's silence. He isn't planning to arrest anyone for a murder more than 50 years old, but he does want to bury the soldier's remains with a name other than John Doe. One of the local oldsters must know that name, but no one, not even his spinster dispatcher, Miss Poole, will talk.

Eight thousand hunters descend on Crawford County, Texas, for the annual pheasant season. To Sheriff Charles Matthews that's 8,000 chances for a gun-related accident. But when the most hated man in the county, banker Rich Hansford, turns up with his face removed by a shotgun blast, it's no accident; it's murder. To Crawford County folk, it's a public service killing, and no one, not even the sheriff's staff, are much interested in seeing anyone arrested. 

In the midst of a bad drought, the shores of a local lake recede to reveal an old abandoned car. Megan is intrigued by the Depression-era jalopy and puzzled when her fellow amateur sleuths would rather get back to discussing Agatha Christie. Then bodies start popping up all over town, ritually murdered, and current crimes take precedence over old secrets. It’s Megan who discovers the corpses, making her the prime suspect.

Enrique Armijo, archaeologist and, in his own mind, the world's authority on the Folsom Man culture, is spying on a ritual performed by the so-called Skin People in the crater of Capulin Mountain, an extinct volcano in northern New Mexico. He doesn't expect to be murdered. He certainly doesn't expect the weapon to be a prehistoric atl-atl. Back in Crawford County, Texas, Sheriff Charles Matthews doesn't expect a call from his deputy, Raul Trujillo, about the archaeologist's murder and the bizarre weapon used.

When cowboy artist Willie Russell is murdered on the Branding Iron Ranch, Sheriff Charles Matthews faces a mystery that seems built on the bones of the past. Willie Russell leaves behind sketches that illustrate a century-old legend of a brutal outlaw, a beautiful young woman, and the lost Santiago Crucifix, a three-foot-tall cross of solid gold. With only the sketches, the footprints of Johnny Brentwood, and very little else, Charles focuses on the eerie links between past and present events. Were Willie's sketches the story of the past, or a portent of the future?

Crawford County, Texas, hadn't had a deliberate homicide in 80 years, and Sheriff Charles Matthews liked that statistic just fine, particularly since his department wasn't generously endowed with manpower. Folks in Crawford County didn't altogether understand Charles Matthews. It wasn't his law degree - lots of folks had law degrees and were still respectable - and it wasn't the fact he was from Dallas. It wasn't even because he never told anybody why he left Dallas. It was because Charles had no nickname in an area where nicknames were as common as sagebrush.

They called her "that hunter woman". On the Texas Panhandle frontier a woman was seen as either a whore or a helpmate. Mattie Jo Hunter was neither. Determined to build a ranching empire on the the desolate plains, she went her own way and asked no quarter from nature or man - including her weakling husband. She would do what she must to realize her dream and secure her own self-respect. As Mattie’s bond with her ranch manager and former Texas Ranger, Jesse McDade, grew stronger, they risked both their honor and their dreams.

The members of the Murder by the Yard book club are spending a pleasant afternoon hiking in Palo Duro Canyon, when one of the Megan Clark’s dogs slips his leash and digs up a human skeleton. Megan’s background in anthropology places her in a position to help police unearth the remains and to find another body: a mummy clothed in Comanche garments. Autopsies reveal that foul play caused both deaths, one less than five years earlier, and the other more than a century ago. Now, Megan must connect the two murders, before she finds herself six feet under.

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 the 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 preacher’s bride is a truck-stop waitress half his age with a reputation that horrifies his congregation and a free and easy way with the male membership. Still, no one expects Reverend David Hailey to stone his wife to death. But that isn’t the worst of Hailey’s acts. Substituting his wife’s body for the Virgin Mary in the Nativity Scene is a worse act of sacrilege than murder. With feelings at a fever pitch in the little Texas town of Canadian, John Lloyd Branson steps in to defend the reverend.

In a variation of the classic locked room mystery, Attorney John Lloyd Branson and his beautiful, trusted, but often impetuous legal assistant, Lydia Fairchild, scare up ghosts from the past and rattle family skeletons as they try to discover who murdered the young museum curator. It’s no Halloween trick when Brad Hemphill materializes in a locked museum at midnight, the main feature in a prehistoric display. Who among the museum staff would kill the harmless, mild-mannered young curator, and why?

Someone is killing prostitutes on Amarillo Boulevard after sending each a cryptic invitation to "cleanse your soul in the blood of the lamb." One victim mails a letter to John Lloyd Branson, the Panhandle's most famous lawyer, begging for his help. When she is murdered before she can talk to him, and her appointment is kept by her pimp and his stable of girls, John Lloyd declines any involvement in the case.

The Murder by the Yard book group has been going strong for six months, and Megan Clark is eager to celebrate - and increase membership. For fun and publicity, she volunteers her friend, Dr. Ryan Stevens, to lead tours of famous Amarillo murder sites. One of the sites witnessed the strangling of a young bride and the subsequent suicide of her husband. The case was never solved - but one of the Gormans wants to know what really happened, and urges the group to reopen the investigation. Megan dives into the research with her usual enthusiasm. But it's soon clear that the killer doesn't take kindly to amateur sleuths....

The exciting sequel to A Time Too Late. Mattie Jo Hunter doesn't fit the norm of gently bred females of the late 1800s - she dares to run her ranch her way. And she does it alone because the love of her life, Jesse McDade, is doing time in prison for murder - the murder of her own husband.

Reference librarian Megan Clark has a passion for fictional crime - but when she and her fellow book group members go from reading mysteries to solving them, they discover that real-life crime is more complex than the most puzzling whodunit.

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.