Triple Play: A Jake Hines Mystery - Hardcover

Gunn, Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802733077 ISBN 13: 9780802733078

Publisher: Walker & Co, 1997

Synopsis

Detective Jake Hines falls into an unusual murder case in which the killer leaves his victims laying across home plate on a softball diamond, dressed to play ball, and with a photo of the crime scene pinned to their clothes

About this title

About the Author:

A one-time innkeeper with a taste for adventure, Elizabeth has been a private pilot, sky diver, SCUBA diver, and liveaboard sailor. Extensive travel in the US, Canada, Mexico and Europe led to a second career as a free-lance travel writer, during which she began writing a series of police procedural mysteries set in southeast Minnesota, where she grew up. Her books contrast the sometimes gritty routine of police work with the idyllic rural scenes around a mid-size city in the upper midwest. Featured characters are a hard-working police detective named Jake Hines and his girlfriend, Trudy Hanson, a forensic scientist at the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in St. Paul. In her new southwest series, Elizabeth follows Sarah Burke, a homicide detective dealing with cutting-edge problems in an ancient setting. The valley that holds Tucson , Arizona , was occupied by native Americans for thousands of years before the Spanish came questing for gold and glory. Folded into the U.S. by the Gadsden Purchase in 1852, this desert city reflects its border heritage, with a polyglot population constantly growing more diverse. Sarah must deal with a colorful mix of twenty-first century adventurers: big-time builders and small-time gamblers, cotton growers and cattle herders, drug-runners and people smugglers, copper miners digging for old-style wealth and bioscientists in search of some new bonanza. Undocumented immigrants scramble up from the south as retiring boomers bring their wealth and optimism down from the north. Naturally, these people don't all mingle peacefully. Wherever their interests collide, that's an ideal spot for a crime novelist.

From the Inside Flap:

t outside Minneapolis/St. Paul, where the city meets the prairie, where the winters are long, the men are rugged, and a stubborn detective with a murky past is a little out of place.  But Jake Hines has to worry about more than just fitting in: there's a serial killer on the loose.

The first victim was found on home plate in a neighborhood park.  The next wore an old softball uniform and an obscene disfigurement.  While Jake, a man who can solve any mystery except that of his own orphaned past, rummages through the dirty laundry of people's lives, a group of high-tech crime busters descends from the big city--thrilled at the chance to dance with a serial psycho.  But even with a beautiful crime-scene photographer providing a major distraction, Jake takes no pleasure from this hunt.  Because this killer is pulling him relentlessly toward one more murder, one more suspect, and one very bitter truth.  .  .  .

About this edition

• Publisher: Walker & Co
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0802733077
• ISBN 13: 9780802733078
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 183