Bøger af Lawrence Rotch

Ziggy Breener, the town eccentric, has pedaled his decrepit bicycle around Burnt Cove, Maine for nearly a decade, picking up empty cans and bottles for the deposit. In all that time, he has avoided talking about his previous life, being satisfied to live in a one-room shack amidst a rag-tag collection of junk and livestock. The fact is that few people notice Ziggy riding the roads, and those who do have little interest in where he came from. All that changes when "The Can Man" inherits a valuable piece of waterfront land on the prestigious Squirrel Point Road. Sadly, his newfound wealth brings with it newfound enemies, and worse, old enemies from his past as well. When Ziggy is nearly killed, amateur sleuths Sarah Cassidy and Oliver Wendell step in to help, but who is the real Ziggy Breener? He won't give them a straight answer, and it turns out that unraveling their friend's tortured past is a dangerous job, especially when powerful people are out to give Ziggy the gift of death for Christmas.

For years, Ziggy Breener, Burnt Cove's eccentric Can Man, has lived a simple life, riding his bicycle along the town roads to collect returnables. Life gets a lot more complicated when Ziggy inherits a piece of prime waterfront land from the equally eccentric Myra Huggard. Moving to a new neighborhood brings new friends as well as new enemies. Sadly, his friends turn out to be more dangerous than his enemies, especially when he's presented with an elephant who moves into his backyard. Things go from bad to worse when his new guest apparently kills somebody, and the elephantine suspect turns out to have a checkered past. Desperate, Ziggy persuades his friends, amateur sleuths Sarah Cassidy and Oliver Wendell to help prove the elephant's innocence. But if the pesky pachyderm isn't the killer, then who is? Did the murder have something to do with a long-forgotten legend about buried treasure hidden on Myra Huggards' land? Were Ziggy's angry neighbors behind the death? Was there some darker motive?

Timber harvesting can be a dangerous occupation, and so can helping a friend in trouble. When reluctant sleuths Sarah Cassidy and Oliver Wendell combine the two, they find the result is downright murder. It all starts when boatbuilder Pearly Gaites persuades Sarah and Oliver to help a logger friend who appears to have been framed for murder. There's more to the logger than meets the eye, however, and the duo quickly find themselves caught up in a tangled thicket of revenge and death where impatient loggers, a greedy landowner, an ambivalent forester, and an over-zealous conservation group are waging a shadowy battle over more than just trees. Then Oliver becomes a victim and Sarah uncovers the truth only to find herself being pursued through the woods by ruthless killers.

Sarah Cassidy attended Migawoc Girls' Camp in mid-coast Maine as a teenager some forty years ago. While there, she befriended Myra Huggard, the camp's crotchety neighbor. The camp is long gone now, its waterfront land sold off for high-end house lots. In addition, ninety-four year old Myra Huggard died a few months ago in a suspicious house fire-at the same time her friend, young Cathy Leduc disappeared.Now, as spring arrives, the elderly couple who ran the camp unexpectedly invite Sarah to spend the summer in Maine, and she jumps at the chance to regroup after her recent divorce, and get out on the water in Owl, the camp's old sailboat.Sarah's vacation turns out to be anything but restful when she discovers that Myra was murdered, and almost everybody has a reason for wanting her dead. When Sarah and Oliver Wendell, a reclusive boatbuilder who is helping her fix up Owl, start asking inconvenient questions, they find themselves being stalked by a killer.It soon becomes clear to Sarah that Myra is manipulating her from beyond the grave, and she has been made a pawn in the old lady's deadly game of lies, blackmail, and murder.To escape this sinister web, Sarah is forced to reexamine her youthful relationship with Myra Huggard as she struggles to separate reality from illusion. In the process, she confronts a long suppressed childhood trauma and murder, all while dealing with her troublesome ex-husband and a would-be suitor whose interest may have more to do with murder that romance.

A murder mystery set in 1949, featuring amateur sleuths John and Mary Wendell.