Posadas County mysteries

Second book in the Posadas County Mystery Series "Havill delivers an evocative tale of hard lives on the edge of society. His portly detective is a genuine low-key pleasure."-Publishers Weekly When Undersheriff Bill Gastner heads to New Mexico's mountains for some respite, the last thing he expects to find is a dead body. But he's a cop through-and-through, and he can't let a criminal walk… Aging Posadas County Undersheriff Bill Gastner has weathered...

When Posadas Register reporter Linda Real barely survives her nighttime patrol with one of Undersherrif Bill Gastner's deputies who is killed by a more accurate shotgun blast than the one that ruins her face, Bill gets angry. Teamed with his intuitive, observant detective Estelle Reyes-Guzman and her usual sharp eye for physical evidence, Bill implicates Tammy Woodruff, the thrill-seeking daughter of the local Republican County Chairman, in the brutal...

Small-town sheriff Bill Gastner faces a crisis when an anonymous letter accuses one of his trusted deputies of corruption, a crisis complicated by the death of one half of a troubled couple that looks increasingly like murder.

Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman is called in to investigate a scene of domestic violence, but she becomes suspicious of an outside assailant when the family's next-door neighbor disappears.

Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman looks for a motive that might connect a competitor found dead on the trail of a 100-mile bicycle race through Posadas County and the three bodies shot to death execution-style at a remote New Mexico airstrip.

"When a county employee is found shot to death in sun-drenched daylight while sitting in his county road grader, Undersheriff Bill Gastner is faced with puzzling questions. The simplest explanation--that an errant bullet from a careless target shooter's rifle blew out Larry Zipoli's brains--is soon discarded as inconsistencies surface. The fatal bullet shows no rifling marks, and investigation reveals that the shooter walked directly toward the road...

Gifted fifteen-year-old Francisco Guzman has become an internationally renowned concert pianist, touring the world under the auspices of his music conservatory. That gives his mother, Posadas County Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman, plenty of reason to worry--and that's magnified when she learns that he's in Mexico's crime-ridden Mazatlan for a concert series where he may be the target for scam artists and kidnappers. Estelle's worries go from bad...

In this prequel to the series, "it's 1986 [and] Undersheriff Bill Gastner is enjoying his usual insomnia alone inside his old adobe when jolted by a horrendous noise. Dreading what he will find, he hastens to the nearby interstate exit where a violent crash has occurred. Not only is the vehicle that struck the support pillars totaled and the driver and a passenger crushed inside, a dead boy has been ejected. As the appalled Gastner recognizes the...

"A Posadas County Sheriff's Department Dispatcher sticks a Post-It note on an incident report. What he meant to write was, "Not for news," hoping that the newspaper reporter who drops into the Sheriff's Office each morning would ignore the report. But what he unintentionally wrote was, "Note for news," and so the arrest of Quentin Torrez, nephew of Posadas Sheriff Robert Torrez, goes public. And Quentin, who has applied for a job with the NightZone...