Only the Truth

When Billy Ray happens upon a befuddled little waif with a red suitcase standing by the railroad tracks, he approaches her. The girl’s name is Charlene and she asks Billy Ray if she can go home with him. He picks up her suitcase, takes her hand, and they walk the three miles down Makin Road to Billy Ray’s house.

Except for Big Dog, Billy Ray has no family. He’s lived his entire life in the same house on Makin road. Billy Ray’s daddy died before he was born and his momma shortly after. His aunty moved into their house and raised him but she passed on when Billy Ray was only fourteen years old, leaving him to fend for himself. Charlene fits right into Billy Ray’s uncomplicated lifestyle. They settle into a routine, unencumbered by past deeds or future longings—a life lived entirely in the present and bound by simple pleasures. But when an old man moves into the house across the street, the past rears its ugly head and life is forever changed. After the old man dies, Billy Ray must confront Charlene’s past and solve a mystery to save her life. The literary whodunit that follows draws the reader into a series of plot twists and turns that lead to a stunning end.

I like Pat Brown’s nonfiction, especially The Profiler: My Life Hunting Psychopaths and Serial Killers, one of the best memoirs I've read in a long time. I was curious if her novel could stand up to it, and it did. Only the Truth, written in a similar spirit as John Grisham’s The Painted House, is a memorable read guaranteed to hold the reader’s attention from the first page to the last. It is a simple, honest story of unconditional love and loyalty. Billy Ray and Charlene have no preconceived expectations, no desires beyond their life together, and they share a mutual adoration cloaked in naïveté. Their small town of Whitfield Glen could be any “Smallville,” U.S.A., plucked out of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesberg, Ohio, or the small Mississippi towns of Eudora Welty. Brown’s characters have a depth and richness that are increasingly absent in contemporary fiction and she weaves a compelling mystery into the fabric of Billy Ray’s and Charlene’s relationship.

Pat Brown is nationally known for her work as a criminal profiler. She is the CEO of The Sexual Homicide Exchange and president of The Pat Brown Criminal Profiling Agency. Her latest book, 
How to Save Your Daughter's Life: Straight Talk for Parents from America's Top Criminal Profiler will be out in August.

Only the Truth is available as an e-book from Amazon. 

Holiday spirit summons ghosts of past deeds

China Bayles is a gutsy woman. She walked away from a lucrative, high-profile career as a big ticket criminal defense lawyer in Houston, traded her high heels for sensible shoes, and used the contents of her 401K to buy an old stable in the heart of the little Texas Hill Country town of Pecan Springs. She opened an herb shop, Thyme and Seasons, on one side of the dwelling and rented the other side to Ruby Wilcox, a new age maven who China describes as “a hoot, that’s all anybody can say—and we certainly say it often enough.” Ruby’s shop, the Crystal Cave, offers books on astrology, tools for divination, and classes on getting in touch with your inner self.

China and Ruby are more than just business neighbors. They are best friends and co-owners of a catering company and they have an affinity for insinuating themselves into the middle of murder investigations, much to the chagrin of China’s new husband, Mike McQuaid, a private investigator and faculty member in the Criminal Justice Department at Central Texas State University. McQuaid has custody of his teenage son, Brian, and the couple is also raising China’s eleven year old niece, Caitlin.

Holly Blues, Susan Wittig Albert’s 18th China Bayles mystery, is set in Pecan Springs during the Christmas holidays. Sally Strahorn, McQuaid’s mentally ill ex-wife and Brian’s biological mother, appears out of the blue claiming to be penniless and homeless. Sally has been diagnosed with multiple personality disorder and her alter ego, Juanita, is a trouble maker.

Despite the fact that Sally has caused serious problems for the McQuaids in the past, in a burst of holiday generosity China impulsively encourages her to spend time with Brian and invites her stay with the family over the Christmas holidays. China soon realizes that her beneficence is sorely misplaced when Sally begins receiving menacing telephone calls from a stalker who is tied to the murders of her parents nearly a decade ago. When Sally’s sister, Leslie, is found dead in her home town of Lake City, Texas, Sally is named a person of interest.

Holly Blues, is a fast-paced whodunit packed with murder and mayhem, spiked with humor, and laced with uncommon sensibility. Albert’s characters are often quirky, but they are believable, warts and all. Her prose is tight and flows easily with details that give her characters depth and authenticity. For instance, the description of the Pecan Springs Chief of Police, dubbed “Smart Cookie’ by the author, is classic Albert:

“Sheila was uniformed in her usual natty blue and gray jacket, shirt, pants, and cap, her blonde hair scooped into a bun at the back of her head. Even so, and with a radio on one hip and a holstered weapon on the other, she’s beautiful. Somehow, it doesn’t seem fair that there’s so much firepower—intelligence, competence, confidence, and damned good looks—loaded into one woman. But while Smart Cookie might look like Miss Dallas costumed for the cover of Law Enforcement Magazine, I wouldn’t mess with her, if I were you. She can outshoot any of her officers, any day. And she don’t take no sass, as the locals say.”

While Holly Blues is part of a series of herbal mysteries, it can stand alone. The author inconspicuously weaves background information about her recurring characters into the first chapters of each book.

Albert earned her PhD in English from the University of California at Berkeley. She served as an Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin, and later became the first woman dean of Newcomb College in New Orleans. After a few years she returned to Texas as Vice President of Academic Affairs at Texas State University in San Marcos. She did not feel fulfilled as a college administrator and professor and one day walked out and never looked back.

Says Albert in her memoir, Together, Alone: A Memoir of Marriage and Place, “And on that day I walked out of the university, I felt astonishingly, astoundingly free—as free as those wild birds—and I could sing my own glorious hurrah. It was only a step, but it was the first, and it was necessary.”

In addition to the China Bayles mysteries, Albert is the author of  The Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter, a mystery series featuring author Beatrix Potter. Albert and her husband, Bill, collaborated on the The Robin Paige Victorian Mysteries from 1994 – 2006. Albert is currently working on a new mystery series, The Darling Dahlias, the first of which is due out in July. She has also authored several non-fiction books.

Like I said, Susan Wittig Albert is a gutsy woman.

You can read the first chapter of Holly Blues at http://www.abouthyme.com/China/CH1HOLLYBLUES.pdf.

China Bayles fans can subscribe to Albert’s weekly newsletter, “All About Thyme” at http://campaign.constantcontact.com/render?v=001QhuZciaLI3XkXzIeiZE9mJAVHXYTEZdWkFq6OIvsnvq6DvRTlz-m4P_3qH8qtY10IuLxxEhZgm5mNOrS-pqeCc7xiC3MRiQg_ZnuZjiv-dioPuuiI8iVJhgOq-vFDIpNS-w0QwQtwHE%3D

This review was originally published in the San Antonio Express News on April 11, 2010 and in the Boerne Star on April 15, 2010.

Lashner scores a home run with 'Blood and Bone'

A forlorn little boy whose greatest desire is to get to know his absent father faces the ultimate sorrow—he must attend the funeral of a man he barely knew, a man whose legacy consists only of a few cloudy memories and a hole in the child’s gut that can never be filled with anything but heartache, dejection, and regret. When the boy, Kyle Byrne, arrives at the funeral chapel with his mother and uncle, he is greeted with scorn and told to leave. All Kyle wants is for someone to tell him that they are sorry about his father dying. To be ordered to leave his own daddy’s funeral is more than Kyle can bear. The little boy spots the urn that contains his father’s ashes. He wants that urn. He wants his dad.

“The . . . man in the dark suit came up the aisle, slowly, jerkily, like in an old movie. Kyle charged right at him, threw out a straight arm, bounced off toward the front of the chapel. He sprinted up the aisle, snatched the urn, popped a spin move before dashing to the side door.”

Growing up, Kyle spots his deceased father everywhere he goes. He sees him at baseball games, in crowds, or just walking down the street. On the occasions that Kyle follows him, he is always disappointed. The shuffling old man with a “bob” of gray hair never turns out to be his dad. He reads obituaries and attends funerals, paying homage to his lost father’s memory.

One day, Kyle attends the interment of Lazlo Toth, his father’s former law partner who has been murdered. There, he meets Robert Spangler who claims to know certain things about Kyle’s father.

“Things that might surprise you,” Robert tells Kyle. “Secrets.”

With this meeting, Lashner’s tale of mysterious deaths, missing files, and human misfits, complete with nefarious characters and a plot that twists and turns with each page, unfolds at breakneck speed.

In addition to a clever, absorbing plot, Lashner has created engaging and endearing characters with whom the reader can identify and who successfully capture the reader’s imagination. His dialogue flows with ease and he imparts a feeling of familiarity through his successful execution of a tale that leads to the pinnacle of political power and the unraveling of dysfunctional family relationships.

Blood and Bone is a captivating read. It has broad appeal for suspense, mystery, and thriller aficionados.