Showing results by author "Bill Crider" in All Categories

Someone in Blacklin County, Texas, is being disrespectful of the dead, and Sheriff Dan Rhodes must put a stop to it. First, there's the matter of the bodies at Ballinger's Funeral Home and the apparent misplacing of their valuables; the bereaved are beside themselves. There'd best be immediate action, or the bell could toll again - this time, for Sheriff Dan's reputation as the guardian of justice and decency in these parts.

On a bloody day in 1887, death came to Blanco, Texas. Before the sun went down, the livery stable was torched, an outlaw gang robbed the bank, two men were killed, and young newlywed Ellie Taine was raped. One of the dead was the man who planned the robbery - the son of dying, legendary Texas Ranger Jonathan Crossland - the other was Ellie's husband, an innocent bystander.

Matt seeks out a paranoid visionary who claims to have defeated an entity just like Mr. Dark. His quest takes him deep into the Michigan woods — and into a bloody siege between warring, paramilitary factions in James Daniels’ "The Beast Within".

Ray Storey plays the role of Kit Carson in Col. A. J. Mahaffey's Authentic Medicine Show, wearing a fringed outfit and doing trick shooting to help the colonel push his Miracle Oil and Indian Vitality Pills. Storey's using his job with the show to travel around the country to look for the men who killed his parents, and of course there's a showdown in the end.

Dan Rhodes, the sheriff of Blacklin County, Texas, has seen more than his share of strange events during his time in office—most recently, he exorcised a ghost from the county jail, and he has always tolerated the banter between his elderly jailer and dispatcher. However, not even Hack and Lawton's friendly word play could have prepared him for the group of writers that have descended upon Blacklin County.

In this tenth installment of the Sheriff Dan Rhodes series, the Blacklin County Texas law enforcer is back to solve even more mysteries. Some of the most amusing sequences in Crider's Blacklin county mysteries are set in the jailhouse, and star the ongoing word battles between its two septuagenarian denizens, Hack the dispatcher and Lawton, the jailer. This time no one at the jailhouse is laughing and Rhodes has a new problem. Not only is the jailhouse itself rumored to be haunted, but a mysterious corpse is found in an open grave in the neighboring town.