Kern Kapers Mysteries

It wasn’t unusual to find a dead body in the orchards surrounding Bakersfield, California. So when Vermilion Blew reads in the local paper about yet one more corpse dug up by a backhoe, she dismisses the discovery. That is, until the revelation that the man had a ticket in his pocket for a movie that she had attended with her fiancé, thirty-seven years before. And that movie was the last time she had seen Frankie Monroe, the evening before her nuptials. Very has gone on with her life, or so she believes, until a slippery slope of events pushes her into a painful and mostly repressed past.

“Killer Kern Strikes Again” read the headlines in the Bakersfield morning paper. Vermilion Blew, in sorrow and disbelief, reads of the late spring icy waters that have claimed three new victims. And exposed a decades old body in the riverbank. Could this be her long missing fiancé, Frankie Monroe, who had left the day before the wedding, 38 years ago? Before Very can ask any questions, she is plunged into an investigation foisted on her by her PI partner. One of the victims is deemed a suicide, but the family refuses to believe this conclusion.