The Man Who Needed Killing

by Susan Brassfield Cogan

“The author never lets any piece fall into place too easily or illogically, never gives any character an easy out from their moral qualms, and colors details so skillfully that you feel the heat of the Oklahoma drought as surely as each little betrayal's knife wound when Joe realizes a friend has lied.”—Publisher's Weekly

One day, Bill Cooper, the meanest man in town, is found beaten and murdered. The suspect list is the size of the Oklahoma county where he lives. It is 1933 and Joe Bennett is a straight-arrow town sheriff who must investigate the death of a man everyone is happy to be rid of. It soon becomes clear that many of Joe's friends know what happened or know something about the death of Bill Cooper and are keeping quiet about it.

Someone--Joe hopes it isn't one of his friends--tries to kill him, firing on his house out of the dark one night. To add to Joe's problems, a beautiful young girl is found dead. Her parents are telling people she fell out of a barn but she doesn't look like she died that way. She looks murdered and the only man mean enough to do something like that has been dead for days.

Joe struggles against his own ignorance about how to conduct an investigation against the backdrop of a world devastated by the Great Depression. Without modern forensics and the tools of modern law enforcement, Joe must investigate a crime which nobody wants solved.

246 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 16, 2011

About the author

Susan Brassfield Cogan is a full time writer and occasionally amuses herself as a graphic designer. She writes things that she enjoys and she enjoys quite a lot. She has been at various times a nurse’s aid, a belly dancer, an actress, a journalist, and a radio shock jock. Her career is long, varied, colorful, often exaggerated and occasionally untrue. Cogan is the author of many novels: Black Jade Dragon, Dragon Sword, Tangled Garden, The Button Man, The Last Gift, Heart of the Tengeri, Murder on the Waterfront and The Man Who Needed Killing. Her nonfiction works include: Hands of the Buddha, The Buddha’s Three Jewels, Rewriting the Buddha and The Pocket Darwin. She written numerous short stories, some of them contest winners.