Bill Crider

Dan Rhodes, the sheriff of Blacklin County, Texas, has seen more than his share of strange events during his time in office—most recently, he exorcised a ghost from the county jail, and he has always tolerated the banter between his elderly jailer and dispatcher.

Jeanne Clinton was a pretty and well-liked woman, though in her younger days, she'd been known to be a bit wild. But she married an older man and settled down to a quiet, respectable life. Now, she is dead...brutally murdered in her home....

For an officer of the law, Blacklin County, Texas, used to be pretty peaceful, but now, what with the emu-rustling, cockfights, and protests at the new Wal-Mart store — not to mention murder — Sheriff Dan Rhodes has his hands full....

Matt seeks out a paranoid visionary who claims to have defeated an entity just like Mr. Dark.....

Someone in Blacklin County, Texas, is being disrespectful of the dead, and Sheriff Dan Rhodes must put a stop to it. First, there's the matter of the bodies at Ballinger's Funeral Home and the apparent misplacing of their valuables; the bereaved are beside themselves....

Sheriff Dan Rhodes knows it's going to be a bad day when Bert Ramsey arrives at the jail with a neatly wrapped arm and lays it on Dan's desk. He has another out in the truck, he tells the sheriff, and "a couple of legs, too, but they don't match up"....

In this latest Sheriff Dan Rhodes adventure, Bill Crider sends the small-town Texas lawman to investigate the apparent theft of a set of false teeth from one of the elderly residents of the Sunny Dale Nursing Home....

In his sixth adventure, Rhodes is confronted with what seems at first to be a suicide: the body of a man newly arrived in the county is found hanged in the dilapidated building he has taken over for his business. Simon Graham was a rare-book dealer....

After he failed to find his missing sister, whose remains finally turned up in a bag in an overgrown field, Texas PI Truman Smith retired to become a housepainter on Galveston Island....

Professor Carl Burns knew the new dean wasn't going to work out when she bought the two goats...

In this tenth installment of the Sheriff Dan Rhodes series, the Blacklin County Texas law enforcer is back to solve even more mysteries.

In tiny Blacklin County, Texas, a curse is nothing more than a four-letter word hollered in a barroom or muttered in the heat. So Sheriff Dan Rhodes is more curious than concerned when he dutifully responds to a complaint of witchcraft....

Ray Storey plays the role of Kit Carson in Col. A. J. Mahaffey's Authentic Medicine Show, wearing a fringed outfit and doing trick shooting to help the colonel push his Miracle Oil and Indian Vitality Pills....

Although at first the dead man floating in the old swimming pool at the edge of town seems to have been an accident victim - a staggering drunk tumbling into the water - Rhodes and his small but colorful staff soon uncover murder....

In this enjoyable fourth series entry, Galveston PI Truman Smith (When Old Men Die, 1994) is hired by Lance Garrison to investigate the shooting of a prairie chicken....

On a bloody day in 1887, death came to Blanco, Texas....

In Murder Takes a Break, Galveston, Texas principal investigator Truman Smith loathes missing person cases....

Hartley Gorman College, in Pecan City, Texas, is hardly a bastion of serious scholarship....

PI Truman Smith has become a loner after failing to find his sister Jan during a recent search of Galveston Island....

Six months ago, Ellie was a newlywed, working the dry land in 1880s Texas. Then the desperados came. They raped her and killed her husband, leaving her for dead. But she hunted them down....