Guilty Employers

About the Book

Cotton Mather, a Memphis college professor and occasional mystery novelist bored with the predictable routine of academic life, secretly wants to be Sam Spade when he grows up.  And when an Elvis impersonator is murdered shortly after Cotton interviews him for a scholarly article on celebrity impersonation, Cotton jumps at the chance to live out his hardboiled daydreams.  

He encounters police corruption, a deranged adult entertainment king, an underage Elvis-impersonator groupie, and a deadly underworld enforcer as he tracks the killer all over Memphis, from Graceland to Beale Street, from the elegant Peabody Hotel to the mean streets of South Memphis, from the glitzy suburbs of East Memphis to the lonely tip of Mud Island.  

Cotton's primary suspects have a bad habit of turning up dead as he stumbles toward the truth in a desperate race to find the killer before the killer finds him.  And when the two finally meet face-to-face, grading final exams doesn't look so boring after all . . .

About the Author

Jude Peters is a 1991 graduate of what was then Memphis State University. Guilty Employers is his first novel.