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.

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....

While all of Blacklin County, Texas, celebrates the first winning season of high-school football in years, Sherliff Dan Rhodes finds himself dealing with drunken festivities, fights, and the murder of the team's offensive coach....

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....

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....

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....

Lizzie Randall, the preacher's daughter, is murdered. The men of the west Texas town are set on lynching Paco Morales, a Mexican teenager who happened to be in the vicinity at the time. No proof, but, after all, he is only a Mexican....

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....

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....

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"....

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....

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....

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

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

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....

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

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

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....

He's smart, he's attractive, and he has a special vision: whenever he sees the blood marks on a woman - marks only he can see - he knows what he must do....

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