Books by Robert Sims Reid

Alexandra Roeg was an artist, and one night she wanted to create a masterpiece by cutting the heart out of the man who raped her.  Proving the case should be easy, she told Detective Leo Banks.  Find the video recording made by a second man, and he would have all the proof anyone would need.For Banks, the attack brought to mind Donna Sanger, an eighteen year girl dead of an overdose five years ago after being lured into the porn trade by a Johnny Perbix, a recording industry mogul turned land developer.  Unable to save Donna Sanger, Banks was determined to get justice for Alexandra Roeg—especially when he learned that her ex-husband worked for Perbix, the man who turned out Donna Sanger.  No stranger to crime and tragedy, the one thing Banks hadn’t counted on was how much he needed to trust somebody.  And worse, the cost of making the wrong choice.BENEDICTION winds through the back rooms and the sometimes bleak, sometimes trendy streets of Rozette, Montana, where hope and vengeance simmer into a poisonous brew.

Even in a small town, street rules apply. That means you handcuff everybody. Even the dead and dying. When two cops spend hour after hour together on the street, policing the bleak hours between midnight and dawn of a Montana winter, they live by street rules. They also get to know things about each other. Sometimes, they know more about their partner than about themselves. Or think they do. Often, they become lifelong friends, until something happens. And something always happens in those bleak hours.How do you treat a friend who kills a man to save your life? Rescues you, the world proclaims, from a situation that you had under control? And if you are that friend, how do you deal with somehow who is ungrateful for the favor? How do you deal with the judgment that you made a foolish mistake, and someone else had to pick up the tab so that you could go home to your family? So that he could go home to a stark room and his memories of a war the whole country wants to forget?How do you keep going on the street—and at home—after the daytime hours turn bleak, too?

When Leo Banks was a young man, he fell hard for a woman named Sarah.  Yet when Banks joined the navy during the Vietnam War, Sarah left him to marry his best friend, Gerry Heyman.  Heyman became a doctor and settled with Sarah in Mauvaisterre, Illinois, his childhood hometown near St. Louis.  He and Sarah had two kids, and life was good, just what both believed that they had always wanted.  After the navy, Banks found his way by freight train to Rozette, Montana.  Against all apparent odds, he became a police officer, completed a career, and retired.  Gerry and Sarah Heyman were long out of his life, until the day they passed through town while on a vacation trip to Glacier Park.Would Banks, Heyman asks, be willing to come to Mauvaisterre and help him investigate a murder that happened nearly fifty years ago?  Heyman is convinced that an innocent man, a man with diminished mental capacity, was wrongly convicted.  Banks is not interested, but things change not long afterward, when he gets word from Sarah that Gerry is dead.  She suspects murder and a connection to his interest in the old crime.  This changes everything and Banks is soon entangled with murder, old and new, a rich man who knows no way but his own, and a lover whom he had long believed gone from his life forever.