Hortense: Aren’t you worried about Buddy Bones, Horace? I mean, if he is still alive, he’s not the sharpest stick in the drawer! We might need to cut our cruise short and go home to take care of him.
Horace: Oh, it was just a dream, dear. I’m sure that d.c. has everything under control. He sent me this excerpt from THE MAGRUDER MYSTERIES PRECISION: A CRIME OF PASSION; THE REBIRTH OF A COLD CASE SLUETH. It was originally the first book in this series, but he rewrote it. He said it fit in better as the second book in the series this way. I’m reading the book description now.
BOOK DESCRIPTION
This is the sequel to THE MAGRUDER MYSTERIES MURDER 8: THE INERT INGREDIENT. It’s the second book in a five-book series, and is set twenty-five years after the first book.
Jay Magruder has retired from his job with the Houston Police Department and moved to Huntsville, Texas. This is the small East Texas city where criminals who have been sentenced to death by the Texas judicial system reside. The facility where these criminals are housed sits alongside the facility where other inmates who have been paroled are released back into society.
Jay Magruder now has nine children by three different wives. His and Alice’s three children are now grown and on their own, but Jay must still pay child support for six more children. When he and Alice divorced, Jay went into a funk. He never completely recovered from it until Alice’s untimely death three days before her fifty-sixth birthday. This led to two more divorces for Jay Magruder, because he was still in love with his first wife.
In addition to the funk his first marriage put him in, Jay is still determined to find the man who murdered his father. As a result of this thinking and the financial strain that paying child support for six juvenile children put him under, Jay accepted a position as senior investigator for the Office of Inspector General at the branch that investigates the correctional system in Texas.
The entity’s thinking was that he could use his skills as the former lead investigator in Houston’s dangerous Third Ward to help weed out undesirable employees. However, many of these officers who didn’t follow the rules had enough pull and seniority to not be punished for their misdeeds or relieved of their positions. Because of this, Magruder grew bored of his new job in less than six months.
As a result, he asked permission to study TDCJ’s cold cases. His hope was that one would lead him to find his father’s murderer, along with the person who murdered his other father figure: Jim Faraday.
One case caught his eye in the box marked “case unsolved, investigation discontinued.” Unable to determine what disturbed him about this case, Jay studied the particulars of it for twenty straight days. On the twentieth day, he realizes what had caught his attention, but he’s still unable to solve the case by himself.
Determined to solve the case, he asks his direct superior for permission to take out an ad in the newspaper asking for help with the case. His sergeant then tells him to use social media, since it’s faster and it’s free. That afternoon, a very tall, large young man answers the ad by coming to Jay’s office. The young man knows every detail of the story that started twenty-five years before. Jay’s surprised the young man knows the whole story because some of it took place before the young man was even born. However, when the young man reveals his identity, Jay understands how he can know the story so well. Be sure to read the epilogue, where the narrator’s identity is revealed to both Jay and the readers.
Comments