For the Part of a Series category in the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge, I decided to go with this book, part of the Harbison Mystery series which I picked up in November, signed, but not at the book signing. To keep you up-to-date, the Harbison mysteries include:
- Terror Near Town
- Tough Times in Grubville
- Sheriff without a Badge
- Murder at Morse Mill
- Homicide Near Hillsboro
And now this book.
So: In it, Sheriff Chet Harbison investigates a murder at a resort. The deceased is a doxy formerly involved with a deputy but dismissed from her job at the county clerk’s office for conoodling on the job. Meanwhile, the widow and mistress, now (whispers) lesbians, of the presumed murdered sheriff who faked his own death and got away at the end of the last book–these two are trying to maintain appearances in Jefferson County whilst using their inheritances to open a bar in St. Louis now that Prohibition has been repealed. The investigations and machinations conmingle with some series business (will the deputy’s journalist girlfriend go to Europe to work for the big national syndicate? Will the sheriff pass his kidney stone?), and eventually they find the bad guys and resolve the situation.
I might have mentioned that I have considered reaching out to Mr. Wilder to offer to proofread his books for him for a galley copy and/or a free copy of the book and maybe an insertion of my fictional kin into the Harbinsonverse. I should probably make that offer, as this book was full of missing quotation marks (full of the lack somehow), problems with formatting, and even anachronisms (referring to The Thin Man movie in January 1934 when it was not released until May of that year)…. I started noting them in my phone as I didn’t have the little flags in Branson with me. I don’t know if Wilder rushed to get it out or his normal pre-readers were unavailable, but this book definitely needed some pre-press work that it did not receive.
So a little underwhelming, but I’ll keep picking up the Wilder series because I still like the little tidbits of local history from a region where I used to live.
