SleuthSayers: Another Round by Mark Thielman

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In Reference to Murder: 30 Years of Short Crime Fiction Excellence

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Review: Diversion: A Probation Case Files Mystery by Cindy Goyette

  

Diversion: A Probation Case Files Mystery is the third book in the highly enjoyable series that began with Obey All Laws. While you could start here, it would be best to read that book and the second one, Early Termination, before embarking on this read. There are backstory and character development aspects in this read that build on storylines of the previous books.

 

Pulled from very boring mandatory staff training, Phoenix probation officer Casey Carson teams up with Betz, her ex-husband and cop, to pay a visit to one Martin Phills as the read begins. He is a murder suspect and hasn’t been on parole supervision long. Her plan is to tell him she needs to conduct the usual home visit. Her home is that with his guard down, Betz and his partner, Anita Moody can get the double murder suspect in custody before he knows what hit him.

 

For Casey Carson, it is her last day before she takes a vacation. Not that her time off is really going to be that relaxing or even a vacation. She is going to go on a diversion program to support her sister, Hope, on her new job. (What happened is just one of several reasons to read the earlier books, so I am not telling you why.) the program is aimed to help kids with issues better ways of getting high on life instead of drugs and alcohol. They will be hiking in the mountains around Flagstaff and on their own.

 

Because Martin Phillips is very much armed at the time of custody, as well as his violently resisting arrest, it should be easy to keep him in custody, regardless of how the murder investigation pans out. She can go on vacation secure in the knowledge that everything is handled.

 

It does not take long for everything on the diversion program vacation has gone wrong in every way possible. Casey Carson, Hope, and others face a lack of supplies, an out-of-control wildfire, and, among other issues, a killer who wants what he wants and is stalking one of them order to get it.

 

An interesting and fast-moving read, Diversion: A Probation Case Files Mystery by Cindy Goyette is also a mighty good book and well worth your time. This read is published by Level Best Books, as are the earlier installments of the series.

 

Amazon Associate Purchase Link:  https://amzn.to/4u3CGnf 

 

 

 

My digital ARC came by way of the author with no expectation of a review.

 

 

Kevin R. Tipple ©2026

Publication Day Review: Robert B. Parker’s Big Shot: A Jesse Stone Novel by Christopher Farnsworth

 

Paradise Police Chief Jesse Stone is on the night shift as Robert B. Parker’s Big Shot: A Jesse Stone Novel begins and he likes it. He really likes it. It is something he does from time to time as they are an eleven member police department. There Is plenty of money in Paradise, Massachusetts, so the sight of the McLaren sports car on its own is not surprising. At the same time, summer is over and that means the summer people are gone. So, it is something to look at as it is just parked at the side of the road.

 

When Jesse looks closer he realizes the driver is passed out in the car. Woken up by Jesse, he comes out of the car belligerent and very intoxicated. Not only does he refuse to cooperate, he takes a swing at Jesse. Before long, he is in cuffs and on his way to the jail.

 

It isn’t until late in the morning of the next day that Molly informs him that he arrested and jailed a notorious celebrity. The man is Ramsey Devlin. The same Ramsey Devlin that beat the federal fraud case, moved out of NYC, and into a newly constructed mansion monstrosity in the area. The same house that many of the neighbors complained to the police about as the eyesore was being constructed even though the situation had nothing to do with the police.

 

Like his client, his attorney, Gordon Wilkes, is arrogant and aggressive. The attorney claims that the arrest is nothing more than police harassment at the behest of the federal government. Neither he nor his client see that Devlin was out of line. Instead, they plan to sue the department into oblivion.

 

Unfortunately, that first incident is not the last. All too soon, Jesse is accused of murder and gets another lesson regarding actual friends.

 

Robert B. Parker’s Big Shot: A Jesse Stone Novel by Christopher Farnsworth is a mighty good read. As author Reed Farrel Coleman did with the series years ago across several books, and as Mr. Farnsworth did in the last novel, Buried Secrets, he again captures the voice and spirit of the series as written by Robert B. Parker. The book comes alive for the reader. It only takes a handful of pages before that the tale is from somebody other than the original author. He has every aspect of those reads down and this new tale just flows for the reader.

 

Strongly Recommended.

 

 

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/48ZTwtx

 

 

My digital ARC came by way of the publisher, G.P. Putnam's Sons, through NetGalley, and with no expectation of a positive review. 

 

 

Kevin R. Tipple ©2026

The Hard Word: "...IT WAS NECESSARY TO GET INTO HAMMETT'S APPROACH": THE RETURN OF THE MALTESE FALCON'S MAX ALLAN COLLINS

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Brandon Barrows - Author: Brand-new release! SINNERS RIDE is alive!

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Guest Post: But Why? Give Me a Motive by M.E. Proctor

 

Earlier this month M. E. Proctor’s latest novel, Catch Me on a Blue Day: A Declan Shaw Mystery, was published by Shotgun Honey Books. Available on Amazon and other platforms, this is the second book in the series that began last year with Love You Till Tuesday. Please welcome back M. E. Proctor as she discusses motive and characters in her latest guest post.

 

 

 

But Why? Give Me a Motive

 

By M.E. Proctor

 

 

One reason often cited for the lasting popularity, almost two centuries, of detective stories is that they satisfy people’s sense of order. In modern fiction this doesn’t always mean justice or retribution; people who do wrong sometimes get a pass or don’t pay the full load for their transgressions. Our grandparents might have scoffed at the idea of a free ride, and upholders of the Hays Code would have wagged their collective disapproving finger, but current readers and viewers are more forgiving. We have generations of anti-heroes in our background.

 

Still, the notion of order remains, in a slightly amended version. Detective stories convey the message that the world can be understood, that mysteries, if human-made, can be decrypted and resolved. That we have a degree of control. It is reassuring because real life doesn’t provide much of that.

 

Take any high-profile case splashed over your screens.

The first question, ‘who did it’, will be answered, most of the times. How they did it, gets handled too. But the why, the what made them do it … is where it gets blurry. The great basic drivers of crime fiction, greed and jealousy, rarely make headlines, unless the money is really big or the victim/suspect famous. People with trigger tempers who lose it in a fit of rage don’t get a lot of media airplay either. It’s the other stuff that keeps audiences enraptured. The hard to explain cases. Because we want to understand, it’s in our nature.

We want to know what makes a person click and what caused them to go off the rails. Why they took the fateful step, why they behaved in a way that’s hard to comprehend. Probably we wonder about ourselves. We want cause and motive. Satisfying answers are hard to find despite all the pundits chiming in and the 24-hour news cycle. They’re mentally ill. Voices told them to do it … Over time, comic books have been blamed, violent movies, video games, online porn, TikTok, AI. The quest for cause and motive continues. And conspiracy theories, inevitably. When you can’t get the answers you like, you manufacture your own. What every tin foil hat wearer wants is to understand. And some version of the truth, forever out of reach.

 

Not unlike fictional detectives and their readers. How would you rate your favorite sleuth if he/she left you hanging at the end of the book, with a shrug and quipped: ‘Oh, there’s nothing to it, they’re just nuts.’ Wouldn’t you think that character is a dweeb? Pull their license and send them back to PI school, or their rose garden if they’re an amateur in a cozy.

 

In a recent story published in the Celluloid Crimes anthology, Garbo’s Ghost, I let my character, homicide detective Tom Keegan, react like a real-life harried and tired cop. He’s seen too many gruesome crime scenes. He just wants to go home:

 

Freddy couldn’t understand why Tom was leaving so soon.
“You don’t want to know who they are and why they did it? Why they took the shoes and where they hid them? They’ll talk, Tom. It’s the only way they can hope to avoid the gas.”
“Killers never have anything interesting to say, Freddy. I plan to get so drunk that by tomorrow I won’t be able to remember their names.”

I don’t feel bad doing this in a short story. Endings that don’t tick all the boxes are allowed. In a book, after 300 pages, and readers invested in the characters and the plot, some kind of explanation is required, otherwise it smells like cheating.

 

Book 2 of the Declan Shaw PI series, Catch Me on a Blue Day, is the hunt for a killer, across time and borders. At the root, there’s a thirty-year-old cold case and a connection to the Salvadoran civil war. Both events have dramatic repercussions in the present. The story starts with the suspicious suicide of a veteran frontline reporter. He was writing a book on Central America that promised to be explosive. Declan Shaw who was hired to help with research for the book uses fragments of the manuscript, notes, and conversations to build the case and zero in on the murderer.

 

Protagonist, antagonist, supporting roles … I believe that to make characters real, the writer needs to feel some empathy for them, however reluctant, and an understanding of their predicament. Their underlying motive. In Catch Me on a Blue Day, the villain is a homicidal maniac with few redeeming qualities. But he is not irrational and should not be shrugged off as a lunatic on a killing spree. The horrible cold case murder was an act of rage and revenge by a proud man being repeatedly rejected and humiliated. It is the reason for the crime, as the killer sees it and justifies it to himself. The violence that follows is his reaction to the fear of being found and caught. Monsters never picture themselves as such.

 

There is logic in the madness, and because the murderer is coherent, in his twisted version of the world, the detective can follow in his footsteps and unravel the mystery.
Find the motive, crack the case. It’s what we all wish for.   

Publisher: Shotgun Honey Books

September 2025, ISBN 978-1-956957-87-7

Paperback: 294 pages

eBook

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/4ndYjxv

 

M. E. Proctor ©2025

M.E. Proctor was born in Brussels and lives in Texas. She’s the author of the Declan Shaw detective mysteries: Love You Till Tuesday and Catch Me on a Blue Day (Shotgun Honey Books). She’s the author of a short story collection, Family and Other Ailments, and the co-author of a retro-noir novella, Bop City Swing. Short fiction in Vautrin, Tough, Rock and a Hard Place, Bristol Noir, Mystery Tribune, Reckon Review, and Black Cat Weekly among others. She’s a Shamus and Derringer short story nominee.
Author Website: www.shawmystery.com. On Substack: https://meproctor.substack.com.

A Writer's Life....Caroline Clemmons: Red Shadows at Saugatuck: A Haunted Shores Mystery by Randy Overbeck

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Publication Day Review: Crime Writer by Vinnie Hanson

  

Any police officer will tell you there is no such thing as a routine traffic stop. Things can go bad in a second. That is exactly what happened to Officer Austin, and his ride along, Zoey Kozinski, in the new novel, Crime Writer by Vinnie Hansen.

 

Zoey is a writer and in the police car this September evening because she is working on her project. The novel is pretty much stalled and she is hoping that the ride along might provide some real-world inspirational details that will help get it going. Her agent certainly would like to see some progress too.

 

It is the night shift for those on the job in Playa Maria County in the central coast of California and the ride along isn’t doing much at all for her. Officer Austin isn’t sharing much with her at all despite her best efforts.

 

After several unremarkable situations, Officer Austin decides to pull over a random car. It takes a considerable distance for the driver to stop as the person seems oblivious to the lights and siren. Once it does stop, the officer approaches the vehicle. Within seconds he is dead on the roadway.

 

The shooter immediately speeds off and then, within a couple of minutes, as Zoey tries to comprehend what she saw and get help, comes back and passes the scene. There is no way the shooter did not see her as the car came by. That means the shooter knows she is a witness.

 

A witness that needs to be eliminated.

 

A witness that the police believe is actually the suspect.

 

A witness the devastated widow firmly believes needlessly distracted her husband and father of their children and thereby got him killed.

 

What follows is Zoey trying to come to grips with what she saw and the aftermath of the tragedy. At the same time, she has to deal with suspicious members of law enforcement who treat here as a suspect as well as killer who is trying to find her and silence her. Things are complicated in her life before the shooting. All that gets way worse afterwards and gets even more complicated before long.

 

Don’t forget Mom. She is sure she knows best on all things and Zoey isn’t having it.

 

Crime Writer by Vinnie Hansen is an entertaining fast moving read. It starts with a compelling idea about an officer killed during a ride along (a thankfully rare event) and builds out from there in a myriad of ways. Zoey is smart, funny, emotional, and a fiery redhead bundle of energy and contradictions.

 

It all makes Crime Writer by Vinnie Hansen a solidly good read.

 

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/4n6abkC 

 

 

My ARC digital reading copy came from the publisher, NetGalley where I was already preapproved and with no expectation of a review.

 

Kevin R. Tipple ©2025

The Hard Word: "I THOUGHT SOMEONE SHOULD WRITE A BOOK ABOUT THEM AND THEN THOUGHT- WHY NOT ME?": BLESS YOUR HEART'S LEIGH DUNLAP

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Aubrey Nye Hamilton Reviews: Bump and Run: A Wade Durham Novel by Richard Helms

 

Bump and Run (Black Arch Books, August 2025) is the 26^th book by retired clinical/forensic psychologist and college professor Richard Helms. He is the recipient of the Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award (twice); the Mystery Readers International Macavity Award; the Short Mystery Fiction Society Derringer Award (twice); the International Thriller Writers Thriller Award; and the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award (twice). His story “See Humble and Die” was featured in Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt’s Best American Mystery Stories of 2020, edited by Otto Penzler and C.J. Box. His short stories have appeared frequently in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Mystery Weekly, and various anthologies and collections.

Wade Durham of the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation and part-time race car driver makes his debut here as he investigates the gruesome murder of a one-time football star in the small town of Choctaw. Win Savage had achieved fame through a fluke play during a Super Bowl game and then parlayed it into a broadcasting career. When his newscaster popularity faded away, he retired to his home town where he continued to capitalize on his name through product sponsorships and speaking engagements. He currently was doing his best to stop a ski resort from being built near Choctaw. Almost everyone else in the town saw the resort as the only way to reverse the slow economic disintegration of their town, so Wade was currently at odds with a lot of folks but no one admitted to being so upset with him that they would kill him, much less hang his body in a barbecue smoker.

Helms captures the politics and personalities of small towns perfectly here, contributing to the story’s strong sense of place. There are always a handful of people who hold an outsized amount of power and influence in small towns, and everyone else has to go along with them or be ostracized, which Wade’s interviews illustrate. Choctaw’s power brokers were the largest investors in the proposed ski resort and therefore had the most to lose if the deal didn’t go through. They became the focus of Wade’s investigation although Savage’s womanizing streak could not be overlooked. He tended to leave a trail of angry women behind him, and Wade met several of them.

A community of off-the-grid dwellers, a hamlet of ruffians and moonshiners, a 45-year-old cold case, and some vivid descriptions of North Carolina nature all contribute to an entertaining police procedural. I always appreciate a well-concealed murderer and I didn’t guess this one. Wrapping up the cold case along the way with a second murderer who had every reason to believe they had escaped justice was a bonus.

Wade Durham has been compared to the Virgil Flowers of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension books by John Sanford. This particular story reminds me of the Donald Harstad police procedurals set in small-town Iowa and perhaps the Alex McKnight novels by Steve Hamilton. Fans of soundly plotted mysteries based on realistic forensics and evidence collection with a strong sense of place should look at this absorbing series launch.

·         ASIN: ‎B0FP2L2GGT

·         Publisher: ‎Barbadoes Hall Communications/Black Arch Books

·         Publication date: ‎August 27, 2025

·         Language: ‎English

·         Print length: ‎406 pages

·         ISBN-13: ‎979-8990041226

 

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/4n6jRLM

 

Aubrey Nye Hamilton ©2025 

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.

The Hard Word: "BIG SELLERS AND SONG TITLES YOU CAN HAVE FUN WITH": BAT OUT OF HELL'S DON BRUNS

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Review: Bump and Run: A Wade Durham Novel by Richard Helms

 

Bump and Run: A Wade Durham Novel by Richard Helms is the first book in a new series. Wade “The Blade” Durham, part time stock car driver, is also a full-time agent for the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI). He has just finished a race and is settled in to eat his victory steak when the boss calls with a case.

 

Choctaw, North Carolina, is dying small town. The population is dwindling and so is the local economy. It is the same story that is playing out across the country. The place will be gone in a couple of years unless something is done to save it. Industry isn’t the answer so the town leadership and other parties are all in on the tourism angle. The multimillion-dollar plan is to make a major area of the local mountain a ski resort in order to save the place.

 

Not everybody is onboard with the idea. Leading the charge against the project is home town hero and to some, villain, Winlock Savage. An aging former NFL QB who spent far more years in the broadcast booth after his playing days were over, has used his wealth to file a lawsuit to stop the project. Just as surely as he puts it to various women in his bed, he means to put it to those who are supporting the project.

 

It would be best for many people if he, at the very least, withdrew the lawsuit. He could go away and that would even be better. Especially if he quietly went away permanent like.

 

That has now happened.

 

Either he was killed or he committed suicide by hanging himself like a hog in the legendary local smokehouse. Either way, he has been smoked.

 

It probably wasn’t a suicide.

 

State Bureau of Investigation Special Agent in Charge, Malik Mourning, wants Wade “The Blade” Durham in Choctaw pronto and working a case that is going to gain national attention. The local police are not equipped to handle such a case and need the help. The local police chief, Navarro, has only been on the job about a year and is more than willing to have the SBI send somebody to work this kind of high-profile case. Or any high-profile case, for that matter, as they have not had a murder in forty years and the pandemic killed the last detective. The position remains unfilled.

 

Durham hits town, visits the smokehouse scene, talks to the locals, annoys some and amuses others, and basically starts poking under all the rocks. Those rocks lead to a case from 1977 and a ton of folks doing all sorts of shady stuff. The list of potential suspects is long. Winlock Savage was a large former NFL athlete and kept himself in shape. He did not commit suicide and then hang himself on a meat hook to get smoked. The man was murdered. Putting a man of his size on the hook in the smokehouse to hang like a butchered hog probably took more than one person.

 

What follows is a highly entertaining novel. Very reminiscent of the Virgil Flowers series by John Sandford, you have the same sort of main character here, albeit with less colorful language. Same attitude about fools that get in the way and a willingness to push authority aside to get the job done. Like Virgil Flowers, Wade Durham gets sent in to clean up messes. Unorthodox, he also might be their best agent. He gets in, finds the responsible parties, and moves on to the next messy situation the boss sends his way.  

 

This is going to be one heck of a series.

 

Bump and Run: A Wade Durham Novel is a fast-moving novel that has a few laughs and a lot of action. Strongly Recommended.

 

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/41XK72L

 

Author Update: "The ebook edition will be free on Amazon for five days beginning on Monday, September 15th."

 

My digital reading copy came directly from the author with no expectation of a review. But, truth be told, as soon as Mr. Helms mentioned that he was doing his version of a Virgil Flowers novel, he had me hooked like a fat bass on the line.

 

Kevin R. Tipple ©2025

Level Best Books: Music Meets Murder by Vinnie Hansen

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A Writer's Life....Caroline Clemmons: THE MAN IS BACK!

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