Footprints to Murder

by Marcia Talley

Overview

When a man is murdered in the woods and the main suspect appears to be a giant ape, Hannah steps in to solve the mystery. Does Bigfoot really exist?

Hannah is delighted to reconnect with her former roommate, Susan Lockley, owner of Scarborough Fairs, at a college reunion, and agrees to step in when Susan's assistant drops out of managing the Sasquatch Sesquicentennial in Granite Falls, Oregon. But when Martin Radcliffe, a professional debunker, is found murdered, surrounded by gigantic footprints, the culprit appears, or was meant to appear, obvious: Bigfoot.
Fantasy or fact? As the conference disintegrates into a chaos of finger pointing, mistrust and fear, it falls to Hannah to restore order. Working closely with Jake, a retired policeman and his K-9, Harley, Hannah hastens to stave off the vigilantes and solve the crime before Bigfoot, if he exists, comes one step closer to extinction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780727886460
Publisher:	Severn House
Publication date:	12/01/2016
Series:	A Hannah Ives Mystery , #15
Edition description:	First World Publication
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Marcia Talley is the Agatha and Anthony award-winning author of eleven previous crime novels featuring survivor and sleuth, Hannah Ives. Her short stories appear in more than a dozen collections and have been reprinted in several of The Year’s Finest Crime and Mystery Stories anthologies. She is a past President of Sisters in Crime, Inc. Marcia lives in Annapolis, MD, but spends the winter months aboard an antique sailboat in the Bahamas.

Editorial Reviews

10/03/2016
In Talley’s well-plotted 15th Hannah Ives mystery (after 2015’s Daughter of Ashes), Hannah agrees to help her former college roommate Susan Lockley, the owner/manager of an event-planner service, put on the Sasquatch Sesquicentennial in Flat Rock, Ore. The conference attracts such folks as debunker Martin Radcliffe of TV’s Don’t You Believe It!, adventurer Randall Frazier (whom Susan calls a “superannuated Indiana Jones”), and cryptozoologist true believer Jim Davis, who has developed a surveillance system using leftover equipment from a defunct Radio Shack franchise. At convention headquarters in Flat Rock Mountain Lodge, Hannah meets retired cop Jake Cummings, who monitors a Bigfoot-sightings database. After a possible Sasquatch sighting, Hannah and Jake discover Radcliffe’s body in the woods. In the subsequent murder investigation, Hannah helps Det. Lt. Barbara Cook weed out a large roster of potentially dangerous suspects. Citations regarding unusual humanoid creatures, most dating to the late 19th century, head each chapter of this entertaining entry. Agent: Vicky Bijur, Vicky Bijur Literary Agency. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

2016-09-19
A West Coast convention for Bigfoot believers takes a hairy turn.After happily meeting up with her former roommate Susan Lockley at their 40th college reunion at Oberlin in Ohio, Hannah Ives takes a slight detour on her return trip home to Annapolisall the way to the Flat Rock Mountain Lodge in Oregon, venue of the Sasquatch Sesquicentennial. Susan, the events organizer, suddenly needs an assistant, and she taps Hannah. Perhaps the distance from her husband, whos somewhere in the Atlantic on a naval training cruise, makes Hannah more susceptible than usual to one of the conventioneers, handsome ex-detective Jake Cummings, whos attending with his retired K-9 partner. Jake is a Squatcher who works with the Bigfoot Field Research Organization. To anyone less charming, Hannah might not restrain her skepticism. Far less polite is Martin Radcliffe, a professional debunker. At his opening-night session, he insults Jim Davis, whos set up a 360-degree motion-activated video camera near the lodge to track Bigfoot. The next day, a lecture on Bigfoot scat is interrupted when something activates Davis camera. The live feed shows a huge apelike creature and a bludgeoned body wearing Radcliffes trademark lime-green sneakers. Hannah not only helps Susan keep the conference on track, but also works with Jake and the local sheriff to sort out the suspects, including Davis and four other attendees whom Radcliffe publicly humiliated: the scatologist, the author of the definitive book on Bigfoot, a Sasquatch hunter hoping to find Bigfoot living in lava caves, and the Native American who found the caves by pendulum divination. But are Hannah and Jake looking in the right direction? Could the killer have something else to gain from Radcliffes death? Or could it actually have been a Bigfoot wielding a very large stick? As Talleys 15th cozy reminds us once more, you cant take her genial heroine (Daughter of Ashes, 2015, etc.) anywhere without her stumbling into a different form of homicide.

Kirkus Reviews