Once a month, Mom gets a box of books from a place in New York called Reader Service. They mostly deal in Harlequins, but several years ago Mom got into a grouping called simply Mysteries. They send a Harlequin in each box as a freebie. We pass the Harlequins on to my sister and then Mom settles in with the mysteries, which she passes on to me when she's done. (One such box yielded PRIMARY STORM, which I wrote about last time.)

It was in these boxes of mysteries that we were first introduced to Texas writer Bill Crider's series about Sheriff Dan Rhodes. Rhodes's Blacklin County is a relatively quiet one: no serial killers, so no excessive body counts; quirky characters, especially Hack, the county dispatcher, and Lawton, the jailer; and equally quirky minor characters, mostly gentle drunken eccentrics, faded high school football gods and beauty queens and the like. You could call it Mayberry with a Texas drawl.

I have an inveterate habit of "casting" books, just as if I were gonna make movies of them. So I see Matt Frewer (probably most famous for his 1980s series MAX HEADROOM, and most recently a member of the cast of Sci Fi's EUREKA) as Rhodes. Rhodes lives in the county seat, Clearview, with his wife Ivy, an insurance agent, two dogs, and most recently a cat. Rhodes acquired all his pets in the courses of investigations.

The series currently extends to fifteen books, the most recent of which is OF ALL SAD WORDS (published in February). I've read four of them and am always on the lookout for others. The first I read was A GHOST OF A CHANCE--obviously; murder, plus a subplot about a "ghost" that turns out to be an emu escaped from an exotic-animal farm.

Unfortunately, I've read the books in no particular order; the next one I read was A MAMMOTH MURDER, which involves the discovery of the bones of an extinct mammoth, and murder done by someone who wants to make more than scientific profit off the bones.

Next up, I read A ROMANTIC WAY TO DIE, and that one was a real goody: it's set at a romance writers' conference held in Blacklin County on an abandoned college campus (a place that reminds me of exactly such a place, Tehuacana's old Trinity University campus--although that may have been demolished or refurbished since I first heard of it); one of the writers, and a gorgeous local-boy-made-good named Terry Don Coslin, who is a male model for the covers of "bodice rippers", end up murdered, and Rhodes himself almost dies when someone sets fire to a campus building trying to cover up evidence. A ROMANTIC WAY TO DIE includes two would-be writers named Jan and Claudia, first introduced (as far as I know) in A MAMMOTH MURDER, who decide to begin a series about a handsome crimebusting sheriff using Rhodes as their model--a running gag ever since.

The most recent one of the series that came in the box is MURDER AMONG THE OWLS (2007)--not literally owls, but among the members of Clearview's Older Women's Literary Society, who read books and meet at the library once a month to discuss them. One member in good standing, Helen Harris, is murdered, and all the suspects seem to have a connection to her ne'er-do-well nephew, Leonard Thorpe. HMMM!

Frankly, I hope in the coming months we get another Rhodes mystery in the mystery box, or our local used bookstore turns up a few in their shelves. The writing is wonderful, done with an absolutely deadpan wit that makes you chuckle out loud; Hack and Lawton remind me of Roscoe and Enos from THE DUKES OF HAZZARD, although Hack and Lawton are a damned sight smarter than their counterparts; and Rhodes's pets are as engaging as any of the humans.

Till then, if anybody comes looking for me, I'll be in a corner somewhere with a book.