Hang Fire

Hang Fire, the fourth in Henry Kisor's Steve Martinez mystery series, "is taut and clean, tightly plotted and flows flawlessly."-Joseph Heywood, author of the Woods Cop mysteries When a pretty teacher is killed by a muzzle-loading ball during an encampment of historical re-enactors, Sheriff Steve Martinez is troubled by her role-playing "persona" as a frontier prostitute. Sex can be a motive for murder. But the death is ruled an accident. Besides, killing a person with a muzzle-loader takes way too much time and effort. The next few months, however, bring a surprising number of seemingly unrelated muzzle-loading deaths. A statistical anomaly-or something worse? To find the answer, Steve must battle skeptics, a lack of forensic evidence, an ever shrinking budget, and a rocky romance with his longtime love. Hot on the trail in the deep woods, he suddenly discovers that he is his quarry's newest target.

Henry Kisor is the author of three previous Steve Martinez mysteries, Season’s Revenge, A Venture into Murder, and Cache of Corpses. He and his wife Debby spend half the year in Evanston, Illinois, and the other half in a log cabin on the shore of Lake Superior in Ontonagon County, Michigan, the real-life prototype for Porcupine County. He is also the author of three nonfiction books, What’s That Pig Outdoors: A Memoir of Deafness; Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America, and Flight of the Gin Fizz: Midlife at 4,500 Feet. He retired in 2006 after thirty-three years as a book-review editor, first for the old Chicago Daily News and then the Chicago Sun-Times. In 1981 he was a nominated finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.