Bad Boy

About the Book

It begins on a rainy Monday morning. Detective Sergeant Beverly Trotwood is on her way to work at the Cop Shop when a shiny pickup truck begins to play bumper tag with her Jeep Cherokee. The driver is wearing an over-the-head Bill Clinton mask. The explosion comes next. Residents at the marina where Bev lives are startled when a bomb goes off in the galley oven of a sailboat. The owners are out on the dock at the time, but what happens to their sleeping cat is far from pretty. Soon, anonymous letters arrive in Bev’s in a basket at the office. Printed in black marker pen and “signed” with a Bad Boy sticker, each is a list of names. Unpleasant things happen to the people on the lists. A loan shark is beaten within an inch of his life; a trigger-happy cop is found dead in the New River. Bev investigates the Bad Boy case. Her sidekick, Ivory Jones, helps; so does Radar Thompson in forensics. For aggravation, they’re dealt Wally Finster, a big ex-marine with a potbelly and a crush on Bev. Bev and Ivory go on stakeout in the ’burbs; there is a rousing rodeo, and the Bad Boy is captured. And Bev still hasn’t decided whether or not to marry Art Ardsbarger.

About the Author

Born and brought up in a small town in Illinois, I went to University of Illinois in Urbana. There I met and married a Korean war vet who had discovered that there were warmer places than Illinois. He got his PhD in engineering, I got my MA and gave birth to five children, and we started looking for those warm places. We went to the following places: Texas, Louisiana, Fiji, Queensland, Northern Territory, Samoa, Hawaii, Mexico, and Florida. The kids grew up and scattered. For fifteen years, my husband and I lived on a sailboat in marinas in South Florida. We spent a lot of time outdoors, and another lot in libraries and bookstores. Finally, the balky diesel engine became too much of a drag, so we sold the boat and moved to Gainesville. I’ve been a waitress; clerk-typist; worked in a library; college English instructor; interviewer for an economic survey; English teacher (high school and community college); very briefly, a substitute teacher (where I learned that teachers with ratbag classes get sick a lot more than other teachers); temp; word-processor operator; secretary; data entry person; general dogsbody to a MacFreak programmer / software developer / inventor; assistant to a bankruptcy trustee; and mailroom employee in a mailing service.