Born in 1883, the year after Jesse James was killed by Bob Ford and buried in his mother’s backyard, Homer Croy grew up near the James farm in northwest Missouri. He talked with many old-timers who knew Jesse and Frank James and their remarkable mother, Zerelda. Eyewitness accounts (sometimes humorous) and Croy’s familiarity with the milieu that produced the outlaw brothers enrich Jesse James Was My Neighbor. Jesse read the Bible before he went out to rob a bank or train (Frank preferred Shakespeare), and he was honest except for those raids, according to Croy. The author follows the James boys, documenting their criminal activities and their human side while sorting out the growing legend. He adds a necrology of the twenty-eight bandits who rode with the James gang at one time or another.

What did Aunt Lalli do before she retired from something clerkish in the police? The question intrigues us even as the narrator and her aunt Lalli plunge headlong into adventures in each of these engrossing detective stories. Aunt Lalli ingeniously solves each mystery, and we celebrate the emergence of a new sleuth into the world of detective fiction.