Bill Crider
Everyone knew her. A lot of them like her. One of them killed her. Jeanne Clinton was a pretty and well-liked woman—though in her younger days she'd been known to be a bit wild. But she married an older man and settled down to a quiet, respectable life. Now she is dead, brutally murdered in her home.
Sheriff Dan Rhodes knows it's going to be a bad day when Bert Ramsey arrives at the jail with a neatly wrapped arm and lays it on Dan's desk. He has another out in the truck, he tells the sheriff, and "a couple of legs, too, but they don't match up." Then there's the tattoo, and the motorcycle gang, "Los Muertos," and Dan Rhodes is in up to his boot-tops.
Bill Kane was going to hang for murdering Ryan's sister... After three long years, folks were shocked Ryan would show his face after abandoning his sister. Others were amazed that he was back at all. No man could have survived that night in Shatter's Grove. Ryan was no ordinary man. Tularosa was in for more shocks and surprises, because he was back for the real truth behind his sister's murder.
6) Gator kill
After he failed to find his missing sister, whose remains finally turned up in a bag in an overgrown field, Texas PI Truman Smith retired to become a housepainter on Galveston Island. But when an alligator is killed and its carcass left on display on a family friend's property, Tru is persuaded to search for the culprit.
Ray Storey plays the role of Kit Carson in Col. A. J. Mahaffey's Authentic Medicine Show. 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. Also accompanying the show are an alcoholic doctor and the colonel's daughter.
11) Murder is an art
12) When old men die
Truman "Tru" Smith is a PI who'd rather be reading Faulkner or fishing on his beloved Galveston Island than solving mysteries, so when his friend Dino asks for help, Tru at first demurs. With some not-very-subtle arm twisting, Dino finally persuades Tru to investigate the disappearance of Old Harry, a homeless vagrant whom Dino and his family have "adopted."