Carrying out an Audubon bird census on Hobson's Choice, a piece of undeveloped Gulf shore property, with his friend Helen Bradley, Harry Brock, a private detective by trade and naturalist by inclination, stumbles on the rotting corpse of Truly Brown, an eccentric town character who in two months, had he lived, would have inherited a large fortune, which includes Hobson's Choice. Helen's wealthy friend Riga Kraftmeier wants to buy Hobson's Choice and hires Harry to help her, but Brown's murder and Kraftmeier's efforts to purchase the land lead Harry into a tangled web of quarrelling families, broken friendships, and murder as events in the past bear their bloody fruit in the present and bring Harry face to face with death. Harry's wife Katherine, pregnant with their first child and deeply anxious about her two children from an earlier, disastrous marriage, presses Harry to abandon his life as a private investigator and take up a less dangerous profession. Harry's struggle to retain his way of life and ease his wife's fears grows increasingly fraught as he plunges deeper and deeper into the Truly Brown murder and a second case involving rustled cattle, a prize quarterhorse, and two feuding families whose violent pasts erupt again with fatal consequences, placing both Harry's life and his marriage in jeopardy.
Kinley Roby is the author of Death In A Hammock, the first Harry Brock mystery. Roby lives in Southwest Florida with his wife, Mary Linn Roby, a writer and editor.
