Laying Bones

November 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.

January 1, 2021
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?

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January 8, 2021
Wortham returns to 1960s Texas for the eighth Red River mystery. Constable Ned Parker's nephew R.B. is dead, drowned, apparently, in his truck after a road accident. But Ned is not one to take things at face value, and something just doesn't feel right about R.B.'s death. As he investigates, he finds things that make him question some of his core beliefs about his community and himself. Could he really be the target of an elaborate conspiracy involving people he considered friends? Might he be imagining it? The author, who hails from rural Texas, is writing about people and a place he knows very well, and this knowledge shows: his laid-back writing style, robust characters, and dialogue that sounds like it's spoken by actual people combine to tell a story that, even though it features one of the mystery genre's most overused themes (conspiracy), feels completely realistic. Another winner from a writer who seems to produce nothing but winners.

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