Courtin' Murder in West Wheeling
Page 23
“You know what I like about you, Homer?”
“What?”
“You know me better’n I do. An’ you love me anyway.”
What could I say to that? What I did say was, “Nina, you never did give me a straight answer—will you marry me?”
“Sure, Homer. I thought you’d never ask.”
About the Author
MICHAEL ALLEN DYMMOCH was born in Illinois and grew up in a suburb northwest of Kentucky. As a child she she kept a large number of small vertebrates for pets and aspired to become a snake charmer, Indian chief, or veterinarian. She was precluded from realizing the former ambitions by a lack of charm and Indian ancestry, and from the achieving the latter profession by poor grades in calculus and physics. This made her angry enough to kill. Fortunately, before committing mayhem, she stumbled across a book titled Maybe You Should Write A Book and was persuaded to sublimate her felonious fantasies. Moving to Chicago gave Michael additional incentives to harm individuals who piss her off. On paper of course.
Also by Michael Allen Dymmoch
Death in West Wheeling
When a local schoolteacher disappears from rural West Wheeling, acting sheriff Homer Deters investigates. Before long he's got three more missing persons, two unidentified bodies, a car theft, a twenty-three-vehicle pile-up in the center of town, a missing tiger, and a squad of agitated ATF agents to deal with.
With no help from the Feds, Homer turns to his buddy, Rye Willis, and West Wheeling's eccentric postmistress, Nina Ross, to locate the missing, identify the bodies, and bring a murderer to justice. Packed with regional charm and Deters’ wit, Death in West Wheeling shows how wild one case can get.
M.I.A.
This gripping novel of suspense is a tale of violent men and violent passions, of missing friends, of loss and love and discovery.
The accidental death of Rhiann Fahey’s second husband leaves her paralyzed by grief and has her son Jimmy cutting school and drinking. The widow’s problems are compounded by unwanted advances from her dead husband’s friend. She does her best to cope, returning to work, dealing patiently with Jimmy’s misbehavior, telling Rory Sinter she isn't interested.
Then a mysterious stranger moves next door. John Devlin offers Rhiann beer and sympathy. He offers Jimmy work.
When Sinter tries to discredit John, then beat him to death, Rhiann comes to John’s rescue. But she discovers her perfect neighbor isn’t what he’d seemed—which leads her to investigate, and to see John in a different light altogether.
A beautifully written story with characters who come to life from the first page, M.I.A. shows one more side of Michael Allen Dymmoch’s powerful storytelling ability.
The Fall
How far would you go to save your life and your world?
After a nasty divorce, single mother Joanne Lessing finally has her life together, and she’s made a name for herself as a photographer. Then, while on assignment, she witnesses a hit and run. Property damage only. No big deal, she thinks. So she does the right thing—calls the cops. Joanne is dismayed when FBI agents arrive with the local detective. They admit the hit and run driver was a mob killer fleeing the scene of his latest hit. Joanne is relieved to find she can’t really identify the hit man.
But when she sees the killer again while on another assignment, she takes his picture and finds her new life and her son’s future threatened. Caught between the Mob and the FBI, she’s on her own...
The Cymry Ring
Ian Carreg is a charming, canny detective with a career he loves and grown children he adores. He’s come to terms with the death of his beloved wife and he’s looking forward to the birth of his first grandchild. Jemma Henderson, on the other hand, is the beautiful daughter of a famous physicist, a skilled surgeon, and a convicted killer.
When Ian pursues Jemma to Cymry Henge, an ancient stone monument, he is sucked into her escape, and awakes in Roman Britain in the year 60 A.D. Ian and Jemma come face to face with both Celts and Romans, and Ian begins to doubt his own sanity—all he wants is to return home. But as they work together, Ian comes to accept the truth and convinces Jemma to help him foil a plot that could radically alter history.
Caleb & Thinnes Mysteries
The Man Who Understood Cats
Two unlikely partners join forces to solve a murder disguised as suicide and catch a killer ready to strike again.
Gold Coast psychiatrist Jack Caleb is wealthy, cultured, and gay. When one of his clients is found dead in a locked apartment—apparently from a self-inflicted wound— burned-out Chicago detective John Thinnes doesn’t believe it was suicide. And Caleb is inclined to agree.
But Thinnes regards a shrink who makes house calls suspicious and starts his murder investigation with the doctor himself. An attack on Caleb that's made to look like an accidental drug overdose starts to change the detective’s mind.
Soon, the two men find themselves a whirlwind of theft, scandal, and blackmail. Forced into an unlikely partnership, they’ll have to confront not only a killer, but hard truths within themselves that will change them forever.
The Death of Blue Mountain Cat
The art world is the backdrop when a controversial artist reaches the end of his fifteen minutes of fame.
Native American artist Blue Mountain Cat has a style described as "Andy Warhol meets Jonathan Swift in Indian country." When he's murdered at an exclusive showing in a conservative art museum, Detective John Thinnes has no shortage of suspects. Targets of the artist's satire included a greedy developer, a beautiful Navajo woman, and black-market antiquities dealers. Even the victim's wife merits investigation.
Thinnes drafts psychiatrist Jack Caleb to guide him through the terra incognita of the art world, and their investigation turns up a desperate museum director, a savage critic, a married mistress, and shady dealings by the artist's partner. Thinnes and Caleb connect several apparently unrelated deaths as they follow leads from Wisconsin to Chicago's South Side and the mystery's explosive conclusion.
Incendiary Designs
Arson, passion, and religious fanaticism set Chicago ablaze in the deadliest summer on record.
While jogging through Chicago’s Lincoln Park, Dr. Jack Caleb runs into murder—a mob setting a police car on fire— with the officer still inside. Caleb rescues the man, but later the cop's partner is found stoned to death. Detective John Thinnes is assigned to investigate.
Evidence points toward members of a charismatic church, but too many of them die in arson fires before the cops can round them up. When arson kills the apparent ring leader, it's too much coincidence. The remaining cop killers plead guilty; the case seems to be closed. But as Chicago heats up in the deadliest summer on record, it becomes clear that a serial arsonist is still at large.
A physician friend of Caleb's is implicated when some of the fire victims are found to have been drugged. To exonerate the man, Caleb sets a trap for the killer, and Thinnes and Caleb are nearly incinerated when the doctor's trap brings the case to a fiery finish.
The Feline Friendship
When a vicious rapist crosses the line into murder, Detective John Thinnes and his prickly new partner draft psychiatrist Jack Caleb to help them track the killer down.
When a young woman is brutally raped in the posh Lincoln Park neighborhood, Chicago Police detective John Thinnes catches the case—even though Thinnes hates working rapes. Worse yet, he has to deal with a new female detective who has a chip on her shoulder the size of a 12 gauge shotgun.
A second victim is murdered, and the rapes become "heater cases." What started as a simple investigation, soon twists around earlier, similar crimes. Tempers flare; the detective squad polarizes across the gender line. Dr. Jack Caleb, a psychiatrist and police consultant, is asked to mediate. But Thinnes's sometime-ally finds himself with conflicts of interest occasioned by their friendship and Caleb's own disturbing case load.
The investigation ranges from Chicago's Lincoln Park to the northern Illinois cit
y of Waukegan. And the explosive climax explores not only the karma of evil but the beginning of a beautiful Feline Friendship.
White Tiger
The TV news report of a woman's murder in Uptown leaves psychiatrist Jack Caleb flashing back to Vietnam and sends him running to his own shrink.
Assigned to investigate, Chicago detectives John Thinnes and Don Franchi find the victim's son, Tien Lee, curiously unmoved by his mother's death. Their preliminary canvass of the dead woman's building and neighborhood reveals that Hue An Lee was well liked and well off, and she had never quarreled with anyone but her "good son."
Attending the autopsy next morning, Thinnes realizes that he knew the victim when he was stationed in Vietnam—twenty-four years earlier. Thinnes is pulled off the case when an anonymous tipster alleges he'd been intimate enough with Mrs. Lee to have fathered her son. But Thinnes can't let go. And when a schizophrenic man shows up at Mrs. Lee's wake, connecting the deceased to another Vietnam vet and to an unsolved murder in wartime Saigon, Thinnes starts a retrospective investigation of that crime. He solicits Dr. Caleb's help. Tien Lee complicates the case by insisting that the paternity allegation is an insult to his dead mother. He tries to keep Thinnes on the case.
Dr. Caleb's therapy leads him to relive his own in Vietnam War experiences. When he's brought into the Lee case by a request to help the schizophrenic mourner, Caleb teams up with Thinnes and his partner to discover the identity of the White Tiger and to set a trap for the elusive killer.
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