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الاستماع والقراءة

Reavis Z. Wortham

In1965 Constable Cody Parker’s frightening dreams of gathering storm clouds for the tight-knit Parker family from Center Springs, Texas, proved accurate. Cody is ambushed and nearly killed on a lonely country road during an unusually heavy snowfall. With that attack, the locals fear that a disturbed murderer “the Skinner” has returned to their community.

While his nephew recovers, Constable Ned Parker struggles to connect a seemingly unrelated series of murders. As the summer of 1966 approaches, rock and roll evolves to reflect the increasing unrest in the country, and the people of northeast Texas wonder why their once peaceful community has suddenly become a dangerous place to live. Ned’s preteen grandchildren, Top and Pepper, are underfoot at every turn. The two lawmen, along with the Deputy John Washington, cross paths with many colorful citizens, including cranky old Judge O. C.Rains, the jittery farmer Isaac Reader, and the Wilson boys, Ty Cobb and JimmyFoxx. And then there’s the arrival in their small community of a mysterious old man named Tom Bell.

Now recovered, Cody decides to follow his main suspect across the Rio Grande and into Mexico. Ned understands that to save his nephew, he will have to cross more than a river—he will have to cross over to the right side of wrong.

Humor, suspense, horror, precognition, and life in the tumultuous 1960s all play apart in the solving of this mystery.

Traber Burns

Blackstone Publishing

Red River Mysteries

The Right Side of Wrong

In October of 1967, the Summer of Love is history, rock and roll is dark and revolutionary, and people in the small east Texas community of Center Springs simply want to live their lives as quietly as possible. But a handsome darkness in the form of Las Vegas gangster Anthony Agrioli has left the business to hide out in their tiny backwater settlement with his blond bombshell girlfriend.

Two years earlier, Agrioli met newlyweds Cody and Norma Faye Parker in a Vegas casino and heard their enthusiastic descriptions of the perfect place to settle down and raise a family. At least it was perfect, before their peaceful world found itself in the crosshairs of a coming confrontation.

Back in Center Springs, thirteen-year-old Top Parker has what his grandmother, Miss Becky, calls a poisoned gift: his dreams, though random and disconnected, always seem to come true. This time Top dreams he's a wagon hub with spokes converging from all directions. To him, the spokes symbolize that something is coming. He doesn't know their quiet community will soon be a combat zone when the gangsters arrive. But they're after something else, not Agrioli … yet.

A sheriff crooked as a dog's hind leg, an unsolved murder in the river bottoms, counterfeit money, and a bank robbery all wrapped in a country Shakespearean comedy once again bring together Constables Ned and Cody Parker, Deputy John Washington, Judge O. C. Rains, and the rest of Wortham's real and sometimes wacky cast of characters.

Vengeance Is Mine: A Red River Mystery

At the tail end of 1967, the Parker family once again finds it impossible to hide from a world spinning out of control. Fourteen-year-old Top still can’t fit in with their Center Springs, Texas, community, and his near-twin cousin Pepper does the only thing she can conceive to escape her own demons: she joins the Flower Children flocking to California—just as three businessmen are murdered in the Red River bottoms on the same night as a deadly hit and run.

Constable Ned Parker wonders if these crimes are connected, but when Pepper disappears, he follows, leaving the investigation in the hands of Sheriff Cody Parker, who hires Deputy Anna Sloan, an investigator with an eye for detail. Following her instincts, she trails killers through a world nearly forgotten, the hunt’s backdrop one of continuous rain, gloomy skies, and floods. When an ambush nearly kills her, the investigation accelerates into gunfire, chases, and hair-raising suspense, while out on Route 66 to California, a man named Crow isn’t what he seems.

Lies, deception, and a band of outlaw motorcyclists prove to the Parkers that no matter where you turn, no matter what you do, the world is full of such darkness that even grandmothers are capable of unspeakable deeds.

Dark Places: A Red River Mystery