Books by Bill Crider and Complete Book Reviews
Willard Scott, Author, Bill Crider, Author, Bill Crider, Joint Author Dutton Books $23.95 (208p) ISBN 978-0-525-94324-2
Scott, the popular weatherman of NBC's Today show, doesn't stretch his imagination too far to create the protagonist of this cozy series kickoff. His amateur sleuth is easygoing, balding Stanley Waters, retired national ""weathermeister,"" ""the man
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Bill Crider, Author Minotaur Books $23.95 (272p) ISBN 978-0-312-20889-9
Blacklin County, Tex., which includes the decrepit little town of Clearview, is where Sheriff Dan Rhodes has kept order in nine previous mysteries (Death by Accident, etc.). Clearview is hardly a hotbed of crime, and the middle-aged sheriff's laid-ba
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Bill Crider, Author Thomas Dunne Books $21.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-312-19927-2
Best known for his Sheriff Dan Rhodes series, Crider here introduces Dr. Sally Good, chair of the division of arts and humanities at a small college in Texas. Though bickering is normal among the professors, someone goes too far when the art...
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Bill Crider, Author St. Martin's Press $21.95 (0p) ISBN 978-0-312-14072-4
Texans take their high-school football seriously-seriously enough for murder in the eighth Sheriff Dan Rhodes mystery (after Murder Most Fowl). For the first time since 1949, Clearview has a shot at the state championship, and the town is ecstatic....
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Bill Crider, Author St. Martin's Press $18.95 (200p) ISBN 978-0-312-11387-2
Down-home Texas policeman Dan Rhodes, the sheriff of Blacklin County who was last seen in Booked for a Hanging, finds a corpse in a bullet-riddled portable toilet floating down river. The congregation assembled on the riverbank for a baptism is...
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Bill Crider, Author St. Martin's Press $17.95 (202p) ISBN 978-0-312-08149-2
Down-home humor, rural shenanigans and sait-of-the-earth characters make up for predictability in this enjoyable, albeit unsurprising, tale. In his sixth outing (after Evil at the Root), Sheriff Dan Rhodes of Blacklin County, Texas, finds the body...
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Bill Crider, Author Walker & Company $18.95 (186p) ISBN 978-0-8027-3213-2
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. But when an alligator is killed and its carcass left on display...
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Bill Crider, Author St. Martin's Press $18.95 (296p) ISBN 978-0-312-05823-4
Alternating points of view--first-person from a serial killer, third-person about a detective and the killer's latest intended victim--serve Crider well here. The unnamed killer begins, lecturing prissily about the need to plan carefully and to vary
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Bill Crider, Author St. Martin's Press $21.95 (329p) ISBN 978-0-312-07093-9
The neatly detailed setup, twisting plot and colorful cast of characters in Crider's latest mystery (after Blood Marks ) will keep readers riveted, so it's too bad that the ending reveals a rather pallid villain. A Mexican-American civil servant...
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Bill Crider, Author Walker & Company $18.95 (192p) ISBN 978-0-8027-5787-6
Anthony Award winner Crider introduces private investigator Truman (Tru) Smith in this promising start of a series. Having returned to his native Galveston, Tex., to try--unsuccessfully--to find his missing sister, Tru spends his days reading...
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Bill Crider, Author St. Martin's Press $15.95 (214p) ISBN 978-0-312-04314-8
When a nursing home resident in sheriff Dan Rhodes's small Texas town is found suffocated, a plastic bag tied over his head, the prime suspect, a fellow resident with whom the victim had quarreled, disappears. The victim's daughter, heir to his...
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Bill Crider, Author St. Martin's Press $14.95 (196p) ISBN 978-0-312-03328-6
Carl Burns, English professor at Hartlery Gorms College--a less-than-distinguished fundamentalist institution in Pecan City, Tex.--is none too pleased when college president Franklin Miller instructs him to organize a seminar for Edward Street,...
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Bill Crider, Author M. Evans and Company $14.95 (0p) ISBN 978-0-87131-565-6
This sluggish, post-Civil War era western opens with three desperados bushwacking loner Lee Strate and lifting his hard-earned stake of $5000. Wounded and left for dead on a trail somewhere near Houston, Lee is saved by Jack Farmer, a free black man,
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Bill Crider, Author . St. Martin's Minotaur/Dunne $22.95 (224p) ISBN 978-0-312-20907-0
Clearview, Tex., may seem a far cry from the shire-like coziness of England, but it has its smalltown gossips and eccentrics, even a ghost who for some reason prefers the county jail to a gloomy mansion, in Crider's 11th easy-going Sheriff Dan...
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Bill Crider, Author Walker & Company $20.95 (0p) ISBN 978-0-8027-3282-8
In this enjoyable fourth series entry, Galveston PI Truman Smith (When Old Men Die, 1994) is hired by Lance Garrison, his still unpleasant but now rich high-school classmate, to investigate the shooting of a prairie chicken (really a kind of grouse)
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Bill Crider, Author Walker & Company $19.95 (192p) ISBN 978-0-8027-3195-1
When Truman Smith, Crider's Texas Gulf Coast semiretired PI, muses, ``feeling guilt is one of the things I do best,'' readers will not argue. Smith, who last felt inadequate in Gator Kill, can't find Outside Harry, well-known indigent of Galveston...
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Bill Crider, Author Walker & Company $21.95 (246p) ISBN 978-0-8027-3308-5
The fifth appearance of Anthony Award- winning Crider's Rockford-like PI, Truman Smith of Galveston, Tex., (following Prairie Chicken Kill) is a thinly plotted tale. Persuaded by his reclusive friend Dino to take on a missing-person case, Tru agrees
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Bill Crider, Author Walker & Company $19.95 (189p) ISBN 978-0-8027-3187-6
The low-key sequel to One Dead Dean finds mild-mannered Carl Burns, English professor at a small denominational Texas college, perplexed by the new dean's campaign for political correctness. Burns's cronies, instructors Fox and Tomlin, ignore the...
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Bill Crider, Minotaur, $24.99 (272p) ISBN 978-0-312-38695-5
Sheriff Dan Rhodes faces two big non–crime-related problems in Crider's winning 18th mystery to feature the Clearview, Tex., lawman (after 2009's Murder in Four Parts). First, a pair of women authors have written a couple of novels starring Sage...
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Bill Crider, Author St. Martin's Minotaur/Dunne $24.95 (279p) ISBN 978-0-312-38674-0
Sheriff Dan Rhodes claims he can't join the Clearview Community Barbershop Chorus because he's too busy “busting crime twenty-four hours a day” in Crider's wryly humorous if somewhat sleepy 16th sleuthathon (after 2008'
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Bill Crider, Author . St. Martin's Minotaur/Dunne $23.95 (265p) ISBN 978-0-312-34810-6
Crider's winning 15th Sheriff Dan Rhodes mystery (after 2007's Murder Among the OWLS
) pits the wry Texan against a local drug ring. Skeptical when Clearview, Tex., newcomer C.P. Benton complains that his neighbors, the Crawford brothers,...
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Bill Crider, Author . St. Martin's Minotaur $23.95 (261p) ISBN 978-0-312-34809-0
In Crider's deadpan 14th Dan Rhodes mystery (after 2006's A Mammoth Murder
), the appearance of a black cat at the sheriff's backdoor is a harbinger of bad news about its owner, Helen Harris, a community fixture and Old Women's...
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Bill Crider, Author . St. Martin's Minotaur/Dunne $23.95 (263p) ISBN 978-0-312-32387-5
Brisk and funny dialogue propels Crider's diverting 13th mystery to feature Texas Sheriff Dan Rhodes (after 2003's Red, White, and Blue Murder
). When a dead body turns up in a Blacklin County forest better known for its bigfoot sightings,...
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Bill Crider, Author . St. Martin's Minotaur/Dunne $22.95 (224p) ISBN 978-0-312-32296-0
In Crider's third Sally Good mystery (after 2002's A Knife in the Back
), the funny, pedantic, unlucky-in-love English professor, whose late husband was related to 17th-century Salem "witch" Sarah Good, must prove she's innocent...
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Bill Crider, Author . St. Martin's Minotaur/ Dunne $22.95 (192p) ISBN 978-0-312-27185-5
Fans of Sheriff Dan Rhodes or of just plain good storytelling will cheer Crider's 12th entry (after 2001's A Romantic Way to Die) in this dryly humorous series. This time around, the Texas lawman must face accusations of corruption from...
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Bill Crider, Author, Clyde Wilson, Author . Five Star $25.95 (263p) ISBN 978-1-59414-603-9
This disappointing procedural captures the tedium of real police work too well for its own good. It's the summer of 1969, a man is about to walk on the moon, and Det. Sgt. Ted “Steve” Stephens has a welcome distraction from the mire
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Bill Crider. Minotaur, $24.99 (272p) ISBN 978-0-312-64017-0
In Crider’s enjoyable 19th Dan Rhodes mystery (after 2011’s The Wild Hog Murders), the Clearview, Tex., sheriff with a fondness for barbecue and Dr. Pepper investigates the murder of hair stylist Lynn Ashton, killed by a blow to the head with her...
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Bill Crider. Minotaur, $24.99 (272p) ISBN 978-0-312-64165-8
Anthony Award–winner Crider’s 20th mystery featuring sheriff Dan Rhodes of Texas’s Blacklin County (after 2012’s Murder of a Beauty Shop Queen) offers the usual enjoyable combination of witty help from dispatcher Hack Jensen, minor crises like a hog
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Bill Crider. Minotaur, $24.99 (272p) ISBN 978-1-250-03967-5
Sheriff Dan Rhodes continues to maintain law, if not order, in Crider’s amiable 21st mystery set in Clearview, Tex. (after 2013’s Compound Murder). Normally, Rhodes and his deputies deal with such stuff as bar fights, robberies, domestic disputes,...
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Bill Crider. Minotaur, $24.95 (272p) ISBN 978-1-250-03970-5
Sheriff Dan Rhodes, who made his debut in 1986's Too Late to Die, is still going strong in Crider's 22nd mystery featuring the Texas lawman (after 2014's Half in Love with Artful Death). A long-abandoned house in Clearview, Tex., has a reputation...
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Bill Crider. Minotaur, $25.99 (272p) ISBN 978-1-250-07852-0
At the start of Crider’s entertaining 23rd Dan Rhodes mystery (after 2015’s Between the Living and the Dead), the Blacklin County, Tex., lawman, who’s enjoying a day off, deftly foils an armed robber at a convenience store by tossing him a loaf of...
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Bill Crider. Minotaur, $25.99 (272p) ISBN 978-1-250-07853-7
In Crider’s fun 24th mystery featuring laid-back Blacklin County, Tex., sheriff Dan Rhodes (after 2016’s Survivors Will Be Shot Again), reclusive Jake Marley, the 60ish scion of a wealthy oil boom–era family, takes a fatal fall onto the stage of the
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Bill Crider. Minotaur, $27.99 (288p) ISBN 978-1-250-16562-6
The murder of a man with a penchant for using fake names, who was found shot to death in an abandoned Clearview, Tex., school building, drives Crider’s fine 25th mystery featuring Sheriff Dan Rhodes (after 2017’s Dead, to Begin With). The day before
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Bill Crider, Author, Clyde Wilson, Author . Five Star $25.95 (235p) ISBN 978-1-59414-874-3
Anthony-winner Crider's laconic down-home humor suffuses his colorful second collaboration with celebrated Texas PI Clyde Wilson, who died in 2008 (after 2007's Houston Homicide
). In the summer of 1970, a possible insurance scam takes...
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