The Tuesday Update

This week sees me in the middle of the copy-edit for my standalone mystery novel, THE DEVIL'S BONES, which is due out in February, 2012, by Five Star.  Here's the back cover copy:

When a late-summer drought drains a pond outside of the small town of Dukaine, Indiana, old secrets quickly come to the surface. A small skeleton is revealed in the mud, and everyone in town is convinced the bones belong to Tito Cordova, an eight-year-old boy who disappeared nineteen years earlier.

Dukaine is home to the SunRipe plant, a tomato processing plant that relies on migrant workers to work the fields surrounding the town. Tito’s mother, Esperanza, was a year-round resident. Both mother and son were just a bad memory, and Tito’s disappearance was thought to be best forgotten by most of the town’s residents.

When the marshal of Dukaine is lured to the pond and shot, the investigation falls to deputy Jordan McManus. Racing against time, and under the threat of his own arrest as a suspect in the shooting, Jordan must dig deep into the past, and face the possibility that Tito Cordova might still be alive.

Has Tito come back to Dukaine to exact bloody revenge? Or is there a different murderer on the loose, using the past as a cover for crimes in the present? After another murder occurs, Jordan McManus finds himself squarely in the crosshairs of the law and a cold-blooded killer.

Even if Jordan survives, nothing in Dukaine will ever be the same.