Deputy Dan sets out to foil Shootin' Sam's dastardly plan to rob a train.

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 Ike's father is Able Terrell, a survivalist who has withdrawn from society and lives in a gated compound.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.

The former deputy mayor of New York City tells the story of the city's comeback after 9/11, offering lessons in resiliency under the most trying of circumstances, and a model for the rejuvenation of any city. Deputy Mayor Daniel L. Doctoroff led New York's dramatic and unexpected economic resurgence after the September 11 terrorist attacks. With Mayor Michael Bloomberg, he developed a remarkably ambitious five-borough economic development plan to not only recover from the attacks but to completely transform New York's economy: New neighborhoods were created. Hundreds of thousands of jobs were generated. The largest municipal affordable housing plan in American history was completed. Ground Zero was rebuilt. And New York adopted a pathbreaking sustainability plan. None of this was straightforward. New York has some of the most entrenched financial and political interests anywhere, and it has a population that is quick to let its public officials know exactly what is on its mind. Doctoroff's plans for a New York Olympic Games and a stadium on the West Side crashed and burned, but phoenix-like he engineered the transformation of the city anyway. Greater than Ever is a bracing adventure--when can-do attitude dove headlong into New York's unique realpolitik of "fuggedaboutit" -- during which the city was changed for the better.

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 septuagarian 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. Rhodes uses his laid back sleuthing skills to find the answers to these puzzling events, which Crider depicts with his usual humor, suspense and small town ambience.

Law enforcement officers have the toughest job in America-keeping the public safe in a crime-ridden society. For nineteen years, Dan Hintz was one of those officers. Hintz always wanted to work in law enforcement. Police cars with their sirens and flashing lights caught his attention as a young boy each time they drove down the streets of his hometown, Shantytown, Wisconsin. Seeing local billboards of police officers leaning over to extend their hands to the children of his community made an indelible impression on him. The fact that officers could carry guns didn't hurt either. Gathering with his friends to play cops and robbers, he envisioned himself as a real police officer chasing down the bad guys, making sure they paid the price for their crimes. Law enforcement officers were his heroes and he wanted to be one of them. "In Pursuit of Justice" is a recollection of Hintz's childhood and adolescence, as well as experiences associated with a nineteen-year law enforcement career in central Wisconsin from the late 1960s until the first day of 1987. It depicts not only youthful discomfiture, but also family tragedies, accidents, and characters that are criminal in nature: miscreants, druggies, drunks, or just plain thugs. It also features individuals that are loveable and misguided, including those that just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hintz is Wisconsin's Andy Taylor-his book of short stories is chock full of small-town eccentrics. What he presented in those stories is emotional, humorous, frightening, tragic, and, above all, revealing. It confirmed the harsh reality that crime and misfortune exist everywhere regardless of whether you live in a big city or a small county with charming towns, rustic farms, and little white churches. Growing up poor on a small farm in central Wisconsin, Hintz depicts not only his often-tragic life from a previous generation but his time in the U.S. Army including a stint in South Korea as a communications specialist. Hintz's law enforcement career ran the gamut of tragic, dangerous, and bizarre circumstances: farm and auto accidents, murder, suicide, bar brawls, medical emergencies, dismembered bodies, creative drug trafficking, illicit liaisons, smart-mouthed citizens, a small-town bully, racial tensions, masturbation gone wrong, and a drug-fueled rock festival from a bygone era just to name a few. But the pinnacle of Dan Hintz's law enforcement career was his involvement in the removal of one of America's most investigated domestic terrorist groups-the Posse Comitatus. Described by the FBI as "one of the first organized manifestations" of a strain of extremism "espousing racial supremacy, but primarily focused on opposition to the federal government," Hintz helped direct the removal of the racist, militia-style group from its Tigerton Dells compound in central Wisconsin.

At the intersection of politics, law and national security--from "protect us at all costs" to "what the hell have you guys been up to, anyway?"--A lawyer's life in the CIA. Under seven presidents and 11 different CIA directors, Rizzo rose to become the CIA's most powerful career attorney. Given the agency's dangerous and secret mission, spotting and deterring possible abuses of law, offering guidance and protecting personnel from legal jeopardy was, and remains, no easy task. The author accumulated more than 30 years of war stories, and he tells most of them.