Mad Dog & Englishman Mystery
2 primary works • 3 total works
Book 4
Sleepy Benteen County, Kansas, turns frantic on election day. Sheriff English, better known as Englishman, faces his toughest reelection challenge yet. The radical religious right is out to unseat him, their candidate an Iraq war hero. Englishman's only available deputy isn't winning him votes. That very morning, while pursuing a vehicle, the hurried deputy rams a school bus carrying the Benteen County teen choir. Englishman's brother, Mad Dog, a born-again Cheyenne, rushes back from a quest to the Black Hills. He has had a premonition that the sheriff is in serious danger. Meanwhile, the sheriff's daughters, attending separate colleges, wake with similar fears, cut classes, and hurry home to keep their father safe. The sheriff believes the girls are the ones in need of protection as election day grows ever wilder. A student smuggles a gun into the school and begins shooting and taking hostages. A private army has seized a nearby farm and holds citizens, including Mad Dog, against their will. And, when he finds some spare time, Englishman needs to clear up one little thing about his deputy's accident: Benteen County doesn't have a teen choir. All this by sundown.
It's enough to make a sheriff wonder why he wants to serve another term.
It's enough to make a sheriff wonder why he wants to serve another term.
Book 6
Benteen County, Kansas, a hellhole in summer under scorching heat and winds, turns even meaner in winter. As a howling blizzard blows down upon Buffalo Springs, the sparsely populated county seat, Sheriff English is presented with a missing doll and a dead baby's switched, but by whom? And why? The elderly coroner disclaims any knowledge, but seems faintly uneasy, especially when the swastika on the tiny corpse is revealed. Meanwhile the sheriff's half-brother, Harvey Edward Maddox, also part Cheyenne and thus known as Mad Dog for his invocation of his Amerind heritage, has picked up a naked dead body from the Sunshine Towers retirement home and is heading towards a treetop burial when diverted by the storm. In a makeshift mound nearby, Mad Dog's pet hybrid-wolf finds a child's skull and evidence of mature bones. Also a fading ID for a living County Supervisor. Can the Hornbaker clan really be asgothicas it seems? And what of the tiny woman in the red shoes back at the Towers who calls herself Dorothy, underlying an odd note of Oz...