The Sheriffs' Murder Cases is the initial volume in The Cumberland Mountain Trilogy, a series highlighting life the Kentucky Mountains during the early and middle decades of the 20th Century. Jacob Newton Herald, High Sheriff, or Chief Deputy, of Chinoe County from 1920-45, is the trilogy's central character, and the accounts are in his own words, or as nearly as his granddaughter Jennifer could copy down. Jake, as he was commonly known to friend and foe alike, received a B.A. Degree from Valparaiso University outside Chicago in 1914. He subsequently applied and was admitted to medical school at the University of Louisville. He left that school with a year remaining, in order to fight in the Great War. He emerged from the war a heavily decorated soldier with the battlefield rank of Captain. He returned to his home county in the mountains, where he became involved in law enforcement, serving for a quarter century. In The Sheriffs' Murder Cases, Jake takes the County Sheriff's job for a shockingly immoral purpose and ends up trying to solve a series of puzzling murders. He enlists the aid of family members, deputizes friends and war buddies, and is led down many paths that build suspense and create the dramatic tension that propels the novel to its climax. Keywords: Romance, Revenge, Action, History, War, Kentucky, Herald, Fiction, Iron Fist, Mystery, Veteran

The Sheriff of Hell's Murder Case is the final novel in Dr. Jack Justin Turner's highly-acclaimed Cumberland Mountain Trilogy. With a mangled arm, and with his long-barreled Luger close at hand, Sheriff Jacob Newton Herald must muster all the cunning and courage that saw him through The Great War to survive the sometimes savage place he calls home. Jake, as he is known by both friend and foe, has been described as a combination of Hamlet and Dirty Harry – but in this last volume Jake exhibits a quite different and endearing personality, when he makes two of the most important decisions of his life. Part murder mystery and part magnificent love story, The Sheriff of Hell's Murder Case again demonstrates Dr. Turner's powerful and insightful explanation of character and locale, in a page-turner that is perhaps unparalleled in modern Appalachian fiction. Turner obviously knows and loves the setting and its inhabitants and puts the lie to the work of a litany of literary carpetbaggers. As one reviewer put it, "Jack Justin Turner's voice rings so true that one might think the author is actually channeling the spirits of his early twentieth century characters. Seldom does a book transport a reader so surely to another place and time." Keywords: Romance, Revenge, Action, History, War, Kentucky, Herald, Fiction, Iron Fist, Mystery, Veteran

Before Crime Scene: The Texas Killing Fields on Netflix, there was The Sheriff's Son - a potential suspect for the League City murders. This true story begins on Valentine's Day, 1961. 14 years old, Claudette Carolyn Covey went missing from Hondo, Texas. On Halloween evening, 1961, Claudette's remains were discovered eight miles from town in a field. She had been shot twice in the head. From the beginning, town folks believed that she was murdered by the corrupt sheriff or his 18-year-old son, whom she was dating. Because of the corrupt sheriff's influence, no one was ever charged with the murder. The story follows the life of the sheriff's son from 1961 to his death in 1998. The son was on the edges of many similar murders of young girls in the Houston and Galveston areas-but he was never charged. After 1961, the sheriff's son was arrested twice for the rape of 12-year-old girls, essentially walking away from these charges due to the connections of his father. After the deaths of the father and son, former wives and step children, no longer terrified-came forward. They tell a horrific story of brutality, rape, incest and murder at the hands of the son. Our novel connects the dots and makes the case that a serial killer went to his grave never charged with his many crimes against young women.

The Sheriff of Frozen's Murder Cases is the second volume in The Cumberland Mountain Trilogy. Sheriff Jake Herald's career was characterized by violence, intemperate outbursts against "Outsiders" (non-Mountaineers), high-handed and perhaps illegal campaign tactics, flights of fancy wherein he extols the beauties of the mountains and the virtues of its inhabitants, incarceration and intimidation of coal camp managers, police and owners, and, some say, inveterate womanizing. He did, however, quite remarkably, find the time to solve the occasional murder case. In this volume, Jake considers running for High Sheriff while being assailed by a series of difficulties, some of them quite bizarre. Violence from a near war in West Virginia between union miners and coal company "detectives" threatens to spill over into Chinoe County, Kentucky. Two bodies are found on the same stretch of railroad track. "Italian Bank Robbers" strike a nearby town, a young school teacher is stalked, and automobiles come to Chinoe with the introduction of a yellow Duesenberg and a Bluebird Overland. The series of murder cases that Jake Herald faces, and the methods he employs, build suspense and create the dramatic tension that propels the novel to its climax, and to an unforgettable resolution that promises a love interest readers are sure to look forward to in the final novel of the Cumberland Mountain Trilogy. Keywords: Romance, Action, History, War, Kentucky, Herald, Fiction, Iron Fist, Mystery, Veteran

Small-town Texas sheriff Dan Rhodes is in for another puzzling mystery in this next in the entertaining, award-winning series Before classes start one morning, the body of English instructor Earl Wellington is found outside the building of the community college. Wellington was clearly involved in a struggle with someone and has died as a result. Sheriff Dan Rhodes pursues and arrests Ike Terrell, a student who was fleeing the campus. Ike's father is Able Terrell, a survivalist who has withdrawn from society and lives in a gated compound. He's not happy that his son has chosen to attend the college, and he's even less happy with the arrest. Rhodes discovers that Wellington and Ike had had a confrontation over a paper that Wellington insisted Ike plagiarized. Wellington also had had a confrontation with the dean and was generally disliked by the students. As the number of suspects increases, it's up to Rhodes to solve the murder while also dealing with an amusing but frustrating staff, a professor who wants to be a cop, and all the other normal occurrences that can wreak havoc in a small town. Bill Crider's Compound Murder is an enjoyable police procedural filled with surprises, chuckles, and a quirky cast that will captivate mystery readers.

In the summer of 1965, several Ku Klux Klan members riding in a pickup truck shot two Black deputies on patrol in Washington Parish, Louisiana. Deputy Oneal Moore, the driver of the patrol car and father of four daughters, died instantly. His partner, Creed Rogers, survived and radioed in a description of the vehicle. Less than an hour later, police in Mississippi spotted the truck and arrested its driver, a decorated World War II veteran named Ernest Ray McElveen. They returned McElveen to Washington Parish, where he spent eleven days in jail before authorities released him. Afterward, the FBI sent its top inspector to Bogalusa, Louisiana, to participate in the murder inquiry—the only civil rights–era FBI investigation into the killing of a Black law enforcement officer by the KKK. Despite that assistance, lack of evidence and witnesses unwilling to come forward forced Louisiana prosecutors eventually to drop all charges against McElveen. The FBI continued its investigation but could not gather enough evidence to file charges, leaving the murder of Oneal Moore unsolved. Klan of Devils: The Murder of a Black Louisiana Deputy Sheriff is Stanley Nelson’s investigation of this case, which the FBI probed from 1965 to 2016. Nelson describes the Klan’s growth, and the emergence of Black activism in Bogalusa and Washington Parish, against the backdrop of political and social change in the 1950s and early 1960s. With the assistance of two retired FBI agents who worked the case, Nelson also explores the lives of the primary suspects, all of whom are now dead, and points to the Klansmen most likely responsible for the senseless and horrific attack.

A New York Times Bestseller & the Basis for the Hit Showtime Docuseries Murder in the Bayou is a New York Times bestselling chronicle of a high-stakes investigation into the murders of eight women in a troubled Southern parish that is “part murder case, part corruption exposé, and part Louisiana noir” (New York magazine). Between 2005 and 2009, the bodies of eight women were discovered in Jennings, Louisiana, a bayou town of 10,000 in the Jefferson Davis parish. The women came to be known as the Jeff Davis 8, and local law enforcement officials were quick to pursue a serial killer theory, stirring a wave of panic across Jennings’ class-divided neighborhoods. The Jeff Davis 8 had been among society’s most vulnerable—impoverished, abused, and mired with mental illness. They engaged in sex work as a means of survival. And their underworld activity frequently occurred at a decrepit motel called the Boudreaux Inn. As the cases went unsolved, the community began to look inward. Rumors of police corruption and evidence tampering, of collusion between street and shield, cast the serial killer theory into doubt. But what was really going on in the humid rooms of the Boudreaux Inn? Why were crimes going unsolved and police officers being indicted? What had the eight women known? And could anything be done do stop the bloodshed? Mixing muckraking research and immersive journalism over the course of a five-year investigation, Ethan Brown reviewed thousands of pages of previously unseen homicide files to posit what happened during each woman’s final hours delivering a true crime tale that is “mesmerizing” (Rolling Stone) and “explosive” (Huffington Post). “Brown is a man on a mission...he gives the victims more respectful attention than they probably got in real life” (The New York Times). “A must-read for true-crime fans” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), with a new afterword, Murder in the Bayou is the story of an American town buckling under the dark forces of poverty, race, and class division—and a lightning rod for justice for the daughters it lost.