The Last Death of Jack Harbin: A Samuel Craddock Mystery

The Last Death of Jack Harbin by Terry Shames is the second book to feature a small Texas town and its retired Chief of Police, Samuel Craddock. The first book was a highly auspicious debut. This comes as a challenge, particularly because, this time around, our hero can’t simply access the scene of crime and all the documentary evidence. He has to be invited to investigate. Fortunately, the town has been blessed with a new Chief who’s a chronic alcoholic and next-to-useless. This enables the “powers that be” to appoint our retiree as a “special consultant”. It’s not restoration of his powers as a law enforcement officer, but it does give him enough of an edge to insert himself into the heart of the puzzle.

As with A Killing at Cotton Hill, the town itself is a character and the solution to the problem depends on understanding the importance of the relationships between all the people who live there. What makes this particularly pleasing is that, as a police officer, he saw many things over the year. Now all he has to do is decide which are significant and whether he properly understood what he saw. This is a triumph!