A Reckoning in the Back Country

Fiction
Where everybody knows your business

A RECKONING IN THE BACK COUNTRY:

A Samuel Craddock Mystery

By Terry Shames

272 pp. Seventh Street Books

Reviewed by Eric Petersen

Terry Shames is back with the seventh entry in her Samuel Craddock mystery series.

Grizzled lawman Samuel Craddock comes out of retirement to once again serve as chief of police for Jarrett Creek, the small, sleepy South Texas border town where he lives. The town went broke a while back and can’t afford to hire a new police chief, and he doesn’t need the money.

This new entry in the folksy mystery series opens with Craddock’s neighbor and friend Loretta Singletary stopping by one morning with her famous cinnamon buns. When she asks what’s been keeping him so busy lately, he tells her that some people’s dogs have mysteriously gone missing.

Loretta mentions that someone she knows has also gone missing, one Dr. Lewis Wilkins. Wilkins and his wife are “lake people” – out-of-towners who own a second home by the lake. When he gets to the station, Craddock finds a message on his phone from the doctor’s frightened wife, Margaret.

At the Wilkins place, Margaret claims that her husband said he was going fishing, but never came back. After poking around the marina, Craddock concludes that Dr. Wilkins never went fishing – he simply disappeared. He also learns that the doctor has been sued for malpractice.

Meanwhile, a man named John Hershel calls to report that he caught two men trying to steal his dog and chased them off. Then two boys find the mangled body of a man in the Texas wilderness. The victim was ripped to pieces, and his hands are tied behind his back.

Local veterinarian Doc England tells Craddock that the victim was killed by dogs – but dogs don’t rip people apart like that unless they’re rabid… or were trained to be vicious, which makes Craddock’s blood run cold. Someone obviously tied the victim’s hands behind his back, then sicced vicious dogs on him.

When the victim is identified as the missing Dr. Lewis Wilkins, Samuel Craddock is left with a baffling murder to investigate. A search of Wilkins’ computer reveals a possible suspect in the doctor’s vengeful ex-patient, a woman in her 50s who had come to the hospital to have her bad knee surgically repaired.

Wilkins had cut open the wrong knee and apparently didn’t sterilize his instruments, because the patient soon developed a severe infection resulting in the amputation of her leg just above the knee. Too terrified of doctors to have the bad knee on her remaining leg repaired, she was left disabled and in a wheelchair. So she sued the quack, and a jury awarded her one million dollars in damages.

Dr. Wilkins was too cheap to pay for decent malpractice insurance, so he lost practically everything. Despite winning that huge judgment against him, Wilkins’ angry ex-patient had been sending him hate e-mail for quite some time. But why bother killing him after winning so much money from him?

After a search of Wilkins’ SUV turns up a bag containing over $200,000 in cash, Craddock uncovers the doctor’s secret life as a high stakes gambler, which his wife knew nothing about. In addition to poker games, Wilkins may have also been involved in betting on dog fighting, a highly illegal but highly profitable enterprise.

The idea that a dogfighting ring could be operating in Jarrett Creek makes Samuel Craddock’s stomach turn. When he was a boy, his father – a bully, a coward, and a useless drunk whom he despised – forced him to go to a dogfight, and he never forgot the sight of dogs being forced to fight to the death.

People warn him that if there is a dogfighting operation in town, it could account for the dogs that have gone missing. The criminals involved with them often steal ordinary dogs – people’s pets – to use as bait for training vicious fighting dogs. And they would have no problem shooting any lawman who tries to mess with them.

Who killed Dr. Lewis Wilkins? Could he have run afoul of dogfight promoters? Was it his vengeful ex-patient whom he’d maimed? What about his own family? His marriage was loveless, his wife and daughter hated him for losing all the family’s money to his quackery, and his life was well insured.

With several suspects and neither the manpower nor the technical resources to properly investigate the murder, Craddock realizes that he’ll have to turn the case over to an outside agency. But with the stakes so high, he won’t let it go. Not if there’s dogfighting going on in his town.

As the twists and turns lead him to a killer, Samuel Craddock begins to understand that even in a small Southern town where everybody knows everybody else’s business, nobody really knows what evil lurks in the soul…

A Reckoning in the Back Country is another fine entry in Terry Shames’ Samuel Craddock mystery series featuring an amiable, folksy, yet intelligent and dedicated Texas sleuth who appeals to a wide spectrum of readers. Highly recommended!

Note: The three previous books in the series, An Unsettling Crime for Samuel Craddock, The Necessary Murder of Nonie Blake and A Deadly Affair at Bobtail Ridge, are also reviewed on this site.

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Eric Petersen is an administrator and blogmaster for the Internet Writing Workshop, an international, online writer’s group run out of Penn State University. You can reach him by e-mail at EricPetersen1970@hotmail.com.