Showing results by author "Steven F. Havill" in All Categories

A rattlesnake fang pegged in a teenager's eye is just the beginning of a spring day for Posadas Undersheriff Estelle Guzman. The injured lad's older brother goes missing, and is found dead in an arroyo, apparently killed by his cartwheeling ATV. But most puzzling is what the dead boy found moments before he was killed...an astonishing discovery that takes deputies back to a five year-old killing. Estelle and the now retired Bill Gastner find themselves looking for a murderer altogether too close to home.

The young Dr. Thomas Parks expects to practice trauma medicine with a distinguished doctor in Port McKinney, Washington. What he does not expect is to be nearly killed within an hour of arriving. The accident changes his life, and with long hours of painful convalescence, Thomas makes a sobering discovery: the physician who has invited Thomas to join his practice is not what he seems.

To most people, hat pins are vestiges of the past, used now only by elderly ladies who don't leave home without a hat. But recently, the notion store in Posadas County has been doing a good business selling hat pins to teenage girls. Following a "cat fight" over a boy, one of the girls, Carmen Acosta, had been suspended from school. But Carmen's friends are still around. So Deena, Carmen's rival, wants something with which to defend herself.

A well-seasoned 69, Sheriff Bill Gastner knows his Posadas, New Mexico, territory as well as he understands the foibles of the human condition. So when a backhoe crushes a man to death, it's more instinct than fact that leaves him feeling there is more to this "accident" than meets the eye.

Aging Undersheriff Bill Gastner's vacation is interrupted by the dead body of a young woman, apparently thrown from a moving car. Other murders convince the Undersheriff to lend a hand.

A reporter for the Posadas Register barely survives a night-time patrol with one of Undersheriff Bill Gastner's deputies, and the investigation points to a young woman known for her thrill-seeking.

When a county employee is found shot to death in sun-drenched daylight while sitting in his county road grader, Undersheriff Bill Gastner is faced with puzzling questions. The simplest explanation - that an errant bullet from a careless target shooter's rifle blew out Larry Zipoli's brains - is soon discarded as inconsistencies surface. The fatal bullet shows no rifling marks, an investigation reveals that the shooter walked directly toward the road grader, in full view of the victim - who did nothing to defend himself.

Good cops have no use for coincidence. When a driver slams his pickup truck—twice—into a tandem bike being ridden by Carlos Guzman and his fiancée, Tasha, in Briones, California, it's more than a simple hit-and-run; the driver clearly intended to harm them. Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman gets the call with the news of her son's accident and wastes no time racing to his side. She is greeted by Police Captain Eddie Mitchell, formerly of Posadas County, who allows Estelle to "consult" on the investigation—but only to a point.