What is Bill Crider reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Bill Crider, author of Compound Murder.

The entry begins:

I'm currently reading The Kill, a 1985 private-eye novel by Douglas Heyes. If you do a search for Heyes on the Internet, you'll find mostly references to his TV and movie work. He was a writer, producer, and occasionally an actor. He worked on some well-known movies and some obscure ones. The Wikipedia article on Heyes doesn't even mention his fiction writing, though your search might have turned up my review of The Kiss-Off, his first crime novel, and a review by J. Kingston Pierce of The Kill. By coincidence, both reviews appeared the same week in 2011.

The Kill is set in Los Angeles in 1938, and the setting is...[read on]

About Compound Murder, from the publisher:

Small-town Texas sheriff Dan Rhodes is in for another puzzling mystery in this next in the entertaining, award-winning series

Before classes start one morning, the body of English instructor Earl Wellington is found outside the building of the community college. Wellington was clearly involved in a struggle with someone and has died as a result. Sheriff Dan Rhodes pursues and arrests Ike Terrell, a student who was fleeing the campus. Ike's father is Able Terrell, a survivalist who has withdrawn from society and lives in a gated compound. He’s not happy that his son has chosen to attend the college, and he's even less happy with the arrest.

Rhodes discovers that Wellington and Ike had had a confrontation over a paper that Wellington insisted Ike plagiarized. Wellington also had had a confrontation with the dean and was generally disliked by the students. As the number of suspects increases, it’s up to Rhodes to solve the murder while also dealing with an amusing but frustrating staff, a professor who wants to be a cop, and all the other normal occurrences that can wreak havoc in a small town.

Bill Crider's Compound Murder is an enjoyable police procedural filled with surprises, chuckles, and a quirky cast that will captivate mystery readers.

Learn more about the book and author at Bill Crider's website and blog.

Read the Page 69 Test entries for Crider's A Mammoth Murder, Murder Among the OWLS, Of All Sad Words, Murder in Four Parts, Murder in the Air, The Wild Hog Murders, and Murder of a Beauty Shop Queen.

Learn about Crider's choice of actors to portray Dan Rhodes on the big screen.

Writers Read: Bill Crider (August 2012).

Writers Read: Bill Crider.

--Marshal Zeringue