Looking for the perfect escape? It doesn’t get much better than a new Sheriff Dan Rhodes mystery by Bill Crider. There’s investigations of crime in a rural Texas county. Justice triumphs. And, there’s lots of humor including the groaner of a pun in the last line of Between the Living and the Dead. Oh, and I didn’t even mention the haunted house.

Rhodes’ dispatcher, Hack, always seems to wake the sheriff up in the middle of the night with an emergency. This time, there’s something going on at the town’s haunted house. Rhodes is a little suspicious because Seepy Benton, a local professor, is opening up an office as a paranormal investigator over the summer break. But when Rhodes and a deputy check out the house, they find a dead body there, a local meth dealer who was out on bond. Rhodes might not believe in ghosts, but he feels as if something is watching him every time he returns to the crime scene. And, it’s not the mice his staff jokes about.

Crider’s mysteries are delightful homespun stories with a quirky set of characters. What would the sheriff do without Hack and Lawton, his dispatcher and jailer, with their off-beat stories, weird imaginations, and knowledge of the local community? And, where else do you get a county commissioner interested in getting a drone to locate meth dealers and feral hogs? Only in Blacklin County, Texas will you find a college math professor taking up paranormal investigation.

Sheriff Dan Rhodes may be the long-suffering Blacklin County sheriff, dealing with eccentric townspeople, runaway bulls, and murder and other criminal investigations. But, don’t worry about the sheriff. He’s levelheaded, even as he deals with the day-to-day life of a rural sheriff. But, he also has his own brand of humor, as evidenced in Between the Living and the Dead. And, the humor doesn’t get much better than the laugh aloud stories in Bill Crider’s mysteries.

Bill Crider’s website is www.BillCrider.com

Between the Living and the Dead by Bill Crider. Minotaur Books. 2015. ISBN 9781250039705 (hardcover), 272p.

*****
FTC Full Disclosure – The publisher sent me a copy of the book, hoping I would review it.