Laying Bones

by Reavis Wortham

Overview

The stakes don't get much higher than murder…

It's January 1969 in the small rural community of Center Springs, Texas. Constable Ned Parker suspects a larger mystery behind the seemingly accidental death of his nephew, R .B., who was found in his overturned pickup near Sanders Creek bridge. It appears that R. B. drowned in the shallow water, but something doesn't add up for Ned, who begins turning over stones in search of what really happened the night R. B. died.

The mystery leads Ned to the Starlite Club, a dangerous honky-tonk recently constructed in a no-man's land on the Lone Star side of the Red River. His investigations there uncover suspicious characters, drugs, and gambling, but even more troubling are a series of murders that seem designed to eliminate anyone who might know what really happened to R. B. on that cold January night.

As he works his way through the cover-up, Ned lands himself in a high-stakes game of consequences with no good end in sight. Are the good citizens of Center Springs conspiring against Constable Parker in his search for the truth?

In this thrilling addition to the historical Texas Red River Mystery Series, Constable Ned Parker bets big, but only time will tell if he'll win justice or a grave of his own.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781464214370
Publisher:	Sourcebooks
Publication date:	01/12/2021
Series:	Texas Red River Mysteries , #8
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	1,069,402
Product dimensions:	8.40(w) x 5.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Reavis Z. Wortham is the critically acclaimed author of the Red River Mysteries set in rural Northeast Texas in the 1960s. As a boy, he hunted and fished the river bottoms near Chicota, the inspiration for the fictional location. He is also the author of a thriller series featuring Texas Ranger Sonny Hawke. He teaches writing at a wide variety of venues including local libraries and writers' conferences. Wortham has been a newspaper columnist and magazine writer since 1988, and has been the Humor Editor for Texas Fish and Game Magazine for the past twenty-two years. He and his wife, Shana, live in Northeast Texas. Check out his website at www.reaviszwortham.com

Editorial Reviews

"Captivating...Wortham adroitly balances richly nuanced human drama with two-fisted action, and displays a knack for the striking phrase." — Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

2020-12-15
Wortham’s eighth stroll down Lamar County’s Memory Lane traces the fatal aftereffects of a dice game in a bar in a no man’s land the meandering Red River has carved out between Oklahoma and Texas.

Top Parker may have the poisoned gift, but he’s still only 14 in 1969—much too young to be sneaking around the Starlite Club with his cousin Pepper, her Choctaw boyfriend, Mark, Curtis Parker, and Curtis' girlfriend, Sheila Cunningham, while R.B. Parker, another cousin, is rolling the bones inside. In R.B.’s hands, the dice are red-hot, but his lucky streak doesn’t last long enough to get him through the night: He ends up in a creek in his wrecked ’47 Chevy pickup—drowned, according to county coroner Tony Roth. The suspicions of Top’s grandfather Constable Ned Parker and Top’s uncle, Lamar County Sheriff Cody Parker, already alerted by the fact that $2,000 R.B. won is missing, go into overdrive when the other gamblers in the game start to drop like flies, every one of them, Roth avers, an accidental death. Club owner Buster Rawlins is clearly up to no good, and his minions act as if they’d be happy to kill anyone he asked them to. But the truth about that fatal game lies deeper, though by no means too deep for readers who can comb through the ranks upon ranks of Parker relatives and the psychedelic horrors that are unleashed when Top’s visions are sent into overdrive by an unwitting dose of LSD.

Nearly as many victims as cousins. Will anyone be left for the ninth installment?

Kirkus Reviews

11/16/2020

When the lifeless body of Constable Ned Parker’s Vietnam vet nephew, R.B., is discovered in his pickup one snowy day in 1969, the death is deemed an accident, but Ned suspects murder, in Wortham’s captivating eighth mystery set in Center Springs, Tex. (after 2018’s Gold Dust). Ned follows clues to the Starlight Club, a honky-tonk on the border of Texas and Oklahoma, and his suspicions are reinforced when other local men turn up dead. Meanwhile, Top, Ned’s 14-year-old grandson, the wise child observer in previous books, has to deal with the newfangled drug culture that’s seeping into small-town Texas life, as well as becoming aware of the complications of love and sex. Sharply defined characters include cocaine smugglers, gangsters at the Starlight, and the new preacher’s nasty children and alcoholic wife. Wortham adroitly balances richly nuanced human drama with two-fisted action, and displays a knack for the striking phrase (“R.B. was the best drunk driver in the county, and I don’t believe he run off in here on his own”). This entry is sure to win the author new fans. Agent: Anne Hawkins, John Hawkins & Assoc. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly