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(More customer reviews)While diving in a storm at night, teenage lovers Donnie Spurlock and Karyn Rainey find a corpse at the bottom of the lake. The townsfolk of Kiowa County are already shaken with the recent unsolved murder of Donnie's father, the mayor of Hoel's Dam, Dennie. The corpse found in the lake is Dennie's older brother Hugh, a WW II veteran missing for forty years whose father also went missing.
Texas Ranger Tillis Macrory investigates the homicides linked by blood, but rumors also include lost diamonds. As the two youngsters refuse to back off and continue digging for the truth, new sheriff's dispatcher septuagenarian retired schoolteacher Esbeth Walters mistrusts all law enforcement officials although she thinks Tillis is the cleanest except when he thinks with the wrong head involving the new deputy Gala.
Esbeth, the star of NO MURDER BEFORE ITS TIME, actually gets involved about halfway into this enjoyable police procedural. Three teams of investigations compete. Tillis assisted by his long time friend and Karyn's father game warden Logan make up the most professional inquiries; the sheriff's office is officially in charge; finally the teen lovers provide an amateur sleuth look. Russ hall brings these divergent competing investigations with Esbeth the retired teacher looking down from her big "desk" with a moral light as she trusts none of the players to learn the truth though her reasoning varies. BLACK LIKE BLOOD is a deep Texas who-done-it with a strong cast.
Harriet Klausner
Click Here to see more reviews about: Five Star First Edition Mystery - Black Like Blood: An Esbeth Walters Mystery
Esbeth Walters, a retired high school math teacher in her youthful 70s, tells herself that she's never too old to learn something new the hard way when she takes a job as part-time dispatcher at the Sheriff's Department - just a week after the mayor of a small town in the county has been murdered. New to the area, she soon learns that somewhere under the crust of her newly adopted rural Texas county there is a history of feuds, corruption, betrayal, and violence. Wild talk of a lost diamond mine helps to peel back the scab and she begins to wonder if even Texas Ranger Tillis Macrory isn't as tainted as the rest of them. He is overly friendly to attractive deputy Gala and has sat at the card table of gambler Morgan Lane. Esbeth tells him, "I think there's something about this one you needed, something that rattles you to your deeps." Tillis isn't helped when the murdered mayor's son Donnie and his girlfriend, Karyn, find another body - Denny's brother Hugh, who's been missing for forty years. Donnie and Karyn, daughter of Tillis' game warden friend, Logan Rainey, can't seem to leave the mess alone, and their relentless digging unearths a side to the story no one, not even Esbeth, could have expected.Russ Hall resides in rustic splendor on a lake in the Hill Country of central Texas.
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