Deadsizing
a novel by David Hughes
“Move over Stuart Woods, Joseph Finder, J. A. Jance, Mo Hayder and Sallie Bissell, for David Hughes. There’ s a new sheriff on the bookshelf and he is spellbinding. I read a lot of books and love a good murder mystery and Deadsizing is Pow!––right off the start. Hughes writes in vivid black and white with gray smeared in between. The characters are so believable. Mike Cougar is a good, solid sheriff who has made a bad, personal decision. I can’t wait to see Mike Cougar and Ben Tate again and again.”
Julia Maynard, Avid Reader Books
The only witness to Sheriff Mike Cougar’s secret is the dead Chrystine Goodall and he knows her murder is about to tear the heart and guts out of his hometown, rip away a veneer of gossip and deceit and expose a tortuous truth—a terrorizing truth that explodes into every corporate office across America. A serial killer is assassinating CEOs in a desperate attempt to stop the carnage of corporate downsizing.
Dead is dead. Dead bodies are just a part of Sheriff Mike Cougar’s job. Until now. Until the murder of Chrystine Goodall the very successful and beautiful wife of Syntex Corporation’s new CEO. Mike knows her. Everyone in Westhaven knows her. For him, Chrystine’s death is his black abyss and he realizes that in death she will haunt him forever. This is the second murder in the last six months connected to Syntex and Mike, Haven County’s young sheriff, knows that circumstances surrounding her death have left him with alarming questions and unthinkable answers. Was her husband, Alexander “the Ax” Goodall the target? Or is he the killer? Is it a deranged ex-employee? Or is it a serial killer?
(Publishing 2017)