cover image One Good and Deadly Deed: A Sheriff Luke McWhorter Mystery

One Good and Deadly Deed: A Sheriff Luke McWhorter Mystery

Dudley Lynch. ECW, $16.95 trade paper (300p) ISBN 978-1-77041-500-3

Lynch’s amiably rambling sequel to 2019’s A Fragment Too Far opens in a blood-drenched West Texas hanger, where two pilots were apparently shoved into the spinning propellers of their airplane. Sheriff Luke McWhorter is faced with a bewildering variety of explanations for the crime. The FBI, whose agents were tracking the pilots’ flights to Mount Ararat in Turkey, suspects that WMD smuggling was involved. On the other hand, local fundamentalist showman Craft Roberts, who’s about to open a glitzy Christian museum, may have hired the pilots to get artifacts from the biblical Ark for a museum exhibit and then decided to silence them. Or rogue Mossad agents might have been responsible. Meanwhile, the arrogant president of the Thesaurus of the Gene Corporation is dropping hints about extracting DNA from very old bones. Lynch plays with many threads and leaves most dangling, and the plot simply stops in a shoot-out at the hospital where a woman is giving birth to babies who may have been conceived with some highly unusual DNA. Readers should be prepared for a fun if frustrating ride. Agent: Steven Schwartz, Jane Freymann Literary. (Oct.)