Nothin' Short of Dyin'
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A snowball’s chance in hell, I thought, on my way through the yard with only a few stray flakes for cover. But the fast rising wind at my back changed all that. Like an arctic dam burst, it smashed through the trees bordering the clover field, gathering a snow cloud ahead of it. This it flung across the field as it raced ahead to scoop another cloud of snow. Blinded by the first volley, when the whole field seemed to explode in white, I could only stand in awe of it. But when the next gust came, I was ready. The corncrib where the pickup was parked was down a hill in a clearing about 50 yards ahead. Although I had not heard the boom of Larry Don’s shotgun, neither had I seen any sign of the pickup. If Camelia had made it that far, she should have been on her way out by now. I moved slowly down the hill through the scrub oak, as the wind tossed their branches and fanned their leaves into such a fury that I could neither see, nor hear, nor think, and left me at the mercy of a bad case of nerves. So when the moon momentarily peeked out from behind a cloud, I instinctively hit the ground and began to crawl. I didn’t know why, whether crawl was better than crouch, or down was better than up. One thing seemed certain, however; if Larry Don were waiting for me in the barn, my present course was suicide. I stopped several feet short of the clearing while trying to decide what to do next. There at the bottom of the hill, the wind was kept partially at bay by the hill itself, and I could see that except for what the wind blew from the trees, the snow had all but stopped. As the stragglers flitted about the corncrib, like the moths of summer, I was taken by how idyllic the scene-white flakes against the weathered gray wood of the corncrib, a white-crested stand of jack pines at the edge of a meadow only a few yards away. If my number came up tonight, I guessed there were worse places to die.
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About the Book
Nothin’ Short of Dyin’ is the long awaited 14th book in the Garth Ryland mystery series. Called “an exemplary series hero” by Publishers Weekly, Ryland lives and works in the small town of Oakalla, Wisconsin (“Lake Woebegone made sinister”) where passions run high, secrets go deep, and nothing is ever quite as it seems.
His morning starts quietly on a picture perfect, mid-November day. But even as he stands at his office widow admiring the flawless blue sky and coverall layer of fresh white snow, he knows it won’t last. Wisconsin Novembers are notoriously bad. They are “one long gray litany of clouds…the ankle deep slush you wade through on your way to your first cold of the season.” Besides, it was a Monday.
So Garth isn’t surprised when town marshal Cecil Hardwick soon arrives and wants Garth to accompany him to a clover field just outside of town where a mud-caked black pickup with bullet holes in the door and blood on the seat is parked. Garth does so under protest, and only because Cecil’s jurisdiction ends at the city limits, where Garth’s begins.
The driver of the pickup is nowhere to be found, and there is no way to identify the pickup because it has no license plate or registration. A day long search turns up nothing but a menacing ex-football star from the Deep South who is looking for the same pickup.
The first fire occurs in the night at Fickle, a whistle-stop five miles south of Oakalla. It bears an eerie resemblance to an earlier fire along Coon Lake where a ghost reportedly walks the shoreline a stone’s throw away from where a father and daughter once drowned.
The second fire strikes at the heart of Oakalla, and at Garth’s heart as well. It threatens his friendship with his housekeper Ruth, who refuses him access to Ruth’s ward at the Women’s Shelter, and whom Garth blames for the fires.
Another fire will occur. A life will be lost. What promises to become a beautiful friendship will be destroyed before the mystery is unraveled and justice served.
About the Author
John R. Riggs is a husband, father, grandfather, walker of dogs, and builder of fires. He lives with his wife Carole on a small farm near Greencastle, Indiana, where he keeps busy doing all the things country life requires.
Throughout the years he has worked as a teacher, football coach, quality control foreman, and carpenter. He was crew chief for James R. Gammon in Gammon's landmark research on the Wabash River. Presently, as he has done for the past 30 years, he works as a researcher for DePauw University Archives. He also mixes chemicals for Co-Alliance, Bainbridge, Indiana. And he writes.
He is the author of 13 books in the Garth Ryland mystery series and has been praised by the New York Times as "a writer with real imagination."