Enjoy this Small-Town Murder Mystery Featuring A Unique Sleuthing Couple
The Myerton High School Mules football team are coming off their first winning season in years and looking forward to an even better one. The team is in great shape, and under their second year coach they're really coming together as a team.
But all is not well with some of the players. Several of them were involved in incidents where the police were called. A couple of players were arrested for petty theft. Overall, members of the team are bigger and more aggressive than anyone remembers them being.
All of this has Helen concerned. But what concerns her more is the peculiar behavior of her chief detective, Dan Conway. He seems distracted, and has gone out of his way to downplay the incidents involving members of the football team.
During all of this, Doctor Martin Maycord finds evidence of a potentially dangerous new drug being used by Myerton's young people. Helen asks Dan to look into it.
Then Martin is hit by a car in front of the hospital. What happens next not only threatens the future of the football team, but Helen's relationship with Dan.
The Detective's Dilemma is the thirteenth novel in the Mercy and Justice Mystery series, a contemporary small town mystery series. The series is a sequel to the Father Tom Mysteries that began with The Penitent Priest and includes the same cast of characters. It features Father Tom Greer, a Catholic Priest who is also an amateur sleuth in the tradition of Father Brown, and his wife Helen Greer, female Chief of Police and detective in the tradition of Kinsey Millhone.
Mathis, J. R.: -
Susan Mathis was born in and grew up in an extremely small town in Alachua County, Florida where her family has lived for more than 100 years. When Susan was still very young, James (J.R) Mathis was born in a somewhat bigger small town about 100 miles south of where she lived. Within a decade, James' small town would become part of Orlando, the biggest tourist destination in the United States. He was not amused. That is how, while Susan was running barefoot, swimming in lakes full of alligators and feeding chickens, James was sitting in his bedroom reading books faster than his father could bring them home from the library.
Were James and Susan to write their love story, it would definitely be an enemies-to-lovers trope. They met in the library where he was working. He found her demands for books that he had to pull and bring to her so unreasonable that he actually turned her into the head librarian. She in turn was so anxious to drive him away that when some friends secretly set them up she laid out an entire speech about how miserable her life was (she is typically very upbeat). Little did she suspect that he had a passionate attraction to misery and they were married just over a year later.
Fast forward 26 years, three children, four grandchildren and 20 years of James working for the Federal government. He was diagnosed with a highly treatable but still very scary form of cancer. As so often happens, this brush with mortality inspired him to do something he'd always wanted to do, write a novel. After the publication of the second Father Tom Mystery, Susan joined him as coauthor. As far as the Mathises are concerned, writing together is the most fun a couple can have sitting at a computer.
