Immigrant Impasse

A seasonal cold and unseasonably heavy snowfall set the stage for Harry and Brenda’s involvement in two seemingly unrelated cases. Both of them had been looking forward to a relaxing getaway with friends at the fabled Courtland Valley Inn in rural Pennsylvania, but rest was nowhere in the script for this Murder Mystery Weekend. Instead, Harry encounters a real corpse while trying to save the Inn’s owner from certain death in a century-old apple barn. Obviously overcome by noxious fumes from a faulty gas heater, the owner was apparently sheltering an unknown stranger who had already succumbed to the poisonous vapors.

Harry’s friend Nicky notices that the exhaust flue had been deliberately blocked to prevent CO from escaping, but the heater explodes in a fireball overnight, consuming the barn and all the evidence before the crime scene is secured. Fearing that the local authorities aren’t up to the task, Harry uses his Company connections to augment the investigation. Even though the dead man’s fingerprints are quickly matched to immigration records for an Israeli reporter who was researching a book about Mexican migrant workers in the 1950s, the false identity proves to be part of an elaborate cover story for something far more sinister.
Meanwhile, Harry returns a favor for an old friend who needs help in finding a missing witness to a sordid criminal operation. The case involves immigrant children enslaved in a brothel that caters to Latin American diplomats in the Nation’s Capital, and the witness was gathering evidence to justify an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid to free the captives. With very little to go on besides the word of a quirky attorney who works in the shadows and lives off the grid, Harry reaches out to his associates for expert assistance.

This is the sixth book in the Harry & Company Mystery Series about retirement age sleuths who still have much to offer. Join Harry and Brenda and their friends as they seek to unravel the false leads and reveal the darker truths behind these tragic episodes. As revolting as the abuses appear to be on the surface, there is much more to the story than systematic mistreatment of immigrants. Passions run high on both sides of the debate about the legal status of foreign-born persons in America, but all roads eventually lead to the same place. As the eminent jurist and TV personality Judge Judy so wisely observed, “follow the money” to find the real answers.