THE GHOST OF A CHANCE

The first sighting was in the jail itself, but before Sheriff Dan Rhodes of tiny Clearview, Texas, can turn ghost-hunter, he's got more corporeal matters to address. For starters, there's a corpse in the local cemetery—unburied and without benefit of casket. That's because the .22 caliber hole in the middle of its forehead is so fresh. Ty Berry, late the president of one of Clearview's two warring historical societies, had not been the most popular man in town: he was too passionate, too single-minded, too insistent on the transcendence of historical preservation to suit laid-back Clearview. But who could possibly have hated him enough to murder him? Easy, says Hank Jensen, Clearview PD's crack dispatcher: Fay Knape, president of the rival historical society. But before Sheriff Rhodes can take her seriously as a suspect, she becomes a second murder victim, leaving the sheriff with a full plate: two murders, a minor but annoying drug operation, cemetery looting, goats and emus running around loose, and of course those pesky hauntings. Too much, a casual observer might think, for a law officer heading a department half a dozen strong; but after ten installments (Murder Is an Art, 1999, etc.), Rhodes scholars know better.

Low-key and folksy as usual, but every so often—not quite often enough—a bracing thread of acid seeps through all that drollery.