BELIEFS CAN BE MURDER
About this book
WHEN HIS OVERLY PIOUS 'WEST OF FORT WORTH' TOWN GETS TOO CLOSE TO HEAVEN, EVERYTHING GOES TO HELL! **One saintly town. Six unholy days. Where's the evil coming from?** The promotional slogan for Flagler, Texas, is "West of Fort Worth, Nearer to God." That's where this Ivy League divinity school graduate has chosen to wear the lawman's star instead of the clergyman's cloth. Luke McWhorter is one strange dude. He is America's only sheriff with a Yale divinity school degree. This makes the man behind the gun in Abbot County, Texas, a complicated creature. He knows a lot about a lot of weapons, church, book learning and the local folks' habits and history. That means he is able to use everything from existential philosophy to holistic psychology to old-time religion to cow-country street smarts as he goes about dealing with caprice, crime and the foibles of the citizenry in his obscure West Texas county. And for years, this has worked well—so well that he's beginning to wonder if this is really what he was meant to do. But one horrendous week in autumn, all that changes. Four religion professors at Flagler's three small church colleges are murdered, and the county's orderly life dissolves in mayhem and dread. The deeper Luke probes into the diabolical underbelly of his hometown, the more he finds himself entangled with tainted mortals caught in the devil's snare. If Abbot County's erudite head lawman can't unravel the blood-letting and chaos being driven by one of America's richest men, Armenian cyber-revolutionaries and Flagler's own homegrown power-hungry provocateurs, the town's safety, even its survival, may be in dire peril. Can this preacher-man-turned-sheriff deal with the deadly boulders being dropped one after another into Flagler's once-tranquil little pool? And if he does, will that trigger his town's badly needed first steps toward release and redemption? In advancing his reader through his multi-layered, spell-binding—and deeply personal—crime fiction thriller, Dudley Lynch saves the best for last. As Luke is solving the Bible professors' slayings, he finds himself eyeball to eyeball with one of history's most remarkable pieces of contraband. This purloined object, he soon understands, is what has left his remote, overly pious homeplace fighting for its safety, its future, its very soul. You will never guess the ending to those unforgettable six days that change the legacy and the future of Abbot County and Flagler, Texas, forever. But does sorting out his community's deadly tangles of self-righteous double-dealing help Luke come to terms with himself? Should his life go in a different direction? Would he let it? If he did, how different would it be? The hero of Lynch's masterful whodunit is a complicated man, and so are the answers. Once you start reading BELIEFS CAN BE MURDER, you aren't going to want its brilliant, keen-eyed, unconventional, yet all-too-human hero going anywhere without you! JAY BRANDON, whose legal thriller, Fade the Heat, was short-listed by the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for best novel, calls Lynch's work “an outstanding mystery debut.” VICTOR L. HUNTER, co-author of The New York Times-reviewed novel, Living Dogs and Dead Lions, calls Lynch a “superb writer” [who in BELIEFS CAN BE MURDER] deftly guides you through apocalyptic terrorism, academic over-reach, religion as entertainment, the chances of fate, the sustenance of friendship and the hunger for love, all out in the sunbaked badlands of West Texas.” JOE HOLLEY, writer of The Houston Chronicle's weekly “Native Texan” column and author of The Purse A Novel of Love, Lust and Texas Politics, calls Lynch a “clever a