The Motel Murder: Midge Sumpter Mystery Number One

The "Motel Murder" is a murder mystery set in the imaginary small town of Seminole Pines, North Florida, a rural farming community surrounded by cornfields, tobacco plantations, and tens of thousands of acres of Southern pines and palmettos. Deputy sheriff Denise "Midge" Sumpter, a young African-American sleuth who has a keen eye for detail and a knack for stitching together the details of a crime, tries to solve a murder that occurred in her grandmother's motel. The victim was both clubbed on the head, strangled, and stabbed. But no murder weapon can be found, and the only man seen earlier at the scene of the crime swears he didn't do it. Among other confusing clues are an unfired snub-nose revolver left in the motel room, a motel safe full of crystal methamphetamine, a torn piece of motel stationery with three mysterious numbers written on it, a bloody footprint belonging to an unidentified man, and a missing girl who checked into the motel with the victim but seems to have vanished into thin air. Among other characters Midge meets or works with are her partner Jake, who is gay, the sheriff of Wassahatchka County, a six-foot seven inch giant she calls Pee-Wee, a barbecue cook who cuts his meat with a machete and keeps a Confederate flag pinned to the wall of his restaurant, a meth-producer who has his works, and a still, out in the woods, and a local addict who proves to be far more articulate and helpful than one would think. A host of other characters you will not easily forget populate the novel. Midge, who loves Cajun food and fast cars, makes do with a ten-year-old Crown Victoria patrol car cast off from the Florida Highway Patrol, while her partner Jake, who usually mans a speed trap and has been in the department several years longer than Midge, drives a brand new Dodge Challenger Hellcat-the department's newest piece of "technology." The Hellcat, which Midge drools over, becomes the nearest mechanical thing to a character in the story, and by the end of the tale, it proves its worth. Adding to the charm of the novel, Midge, who grew up in Seminole Pines and speaks in the local dialect, tells the story in first person. The dialect is very easy to read, but it's authentic spoken English as you would hear it were you to visit Northern Florida. At times, the language gets a little salty, but Midge tells the tale accurately and honestly in the real language of the place. Coming soon is the second novel in the Midge Sumpter series, "The Indian Mound Murder." A professor of anthropology at a nearby university who is an expert in Florida's Paleo-Indians, is found dead in an exploratory trench dug into a local mound that is perhaps twelve to thirteen thousand years old-dating to the earliest era of human habitation. Only, the dead professor was supposed to be at another dig site 250 miles south, and no one can account for how he got where he has been found. None of the people working at the mound, neither the site manager, another local paleontologist, nor any of the four graduate students working with her, know how he got there-or who killed him. The site has some curious features, including cigarette butts stuck filter-end-first into the mound, empty beer cans strewn around, and local legends about spirits that inhabit the place. Once again, Midge, her partner Jake, and Sheriff Pee-Wee Marion, have their hands full trying to figure out who killed the victim. This time, the characters include an ex-Army Ranger Captain who is a woman, two ex-Army Special Ops personnel, a local hermit who lives in a shack entirely made out of abandoned or recycled lumber, a local hardware store clerk who was a schoolmate of Denise, and the dead professor's lover, another anthropologist who was supposed to be with the dead man the night he died. Midge's Crown Vic is back, as is Jake's Challenger Hellcat, and Pee-Wee's Chevy Suburban.