Books by Stephen F Wilcox

Stephen Wilcox's mysteries featuring reporter and amateur sleuth T.S.W. Sheridan complement their twisty plots with smart, witty writing and the best local-color mystery writing north of the isle of Manhattan. With The Green Mosaic, Wilcox introduces new elements that bring this mystery a step beyond its predecessors: the rugged terrain of the Adirondacks, and a mysterious death involving a band of environmental activists and their charismatic, renegade leader. The victim is Glenny Oldham, an Indian Lake photojournalist and green activist. The body was found fallen from a slope she should have been able to negotiate in her sleep. And the pieces of the puzzle include old flames, new jealousies, and a local culture steeped in age-old hostilities between forces of progress and preservation.... ...Just the kind of worm-can Sheridan could do without opening.

Stephen Wilcox's second upstate New York mystery series, featuring rascal reporter Elias "Hack" Hackshaw, debuted last year to rave reviews. Now Hack is back - and in quite a mess - as he becomes embroiled in a real estate controversy that turns ugly indeed. Kirkville's NIMBY (Not-in-my-backyard) brigade is up in arms about the county's plans to install a landfill in a remote corner of their town; and, as always, Hack - chief opinionator for the Triton Advertiser and town gadfly - finds himself caught squarely in the middle. Wouldn't it be better, he reasons in an editorial, to accept the inevitable? Wouldn't it indeed, his loyal detractors shout back, when you yourself stand to make a tidy sum of cash out of the deal? In a generous gesture to hear both sides of the issue, Hack agrees to interview one of the landfill's opponents, Elton Venable. But when Hack arrives at the abandoned home that stands in the way of the landfill, he finds that not only those old walls had been left to rot. Elton Venable himself lies dead on the floor - leaving Hack the prime suspect. Hack is a fast talker - he's juggling suspicious cops, two or three doomed relationships, and newspaper deadlines, all at once - but The Nimby Factor promises to vex him more than anything that has come before.