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Last Name on the List
It's November, 1992, in the Hill Country of Central Texas. The excitement generated by the fall of the Soviet Union almost three years before has faded. Or, at least it has for most people in Balcones, Texas, a small Central Texas town. With little fanfare, German deutschmarks, French francs and American dollars have begun forcing open the file drawers and scarred desks of formerly hidden Soviet regimes. At the same time, carefully cultivated hatred generated by that war have begun bubbling up in private.
"Last Name on the List" concerns ordinary people under extraordinary and confusing pressure. In the case of Balcones, there are two pressures. The first concerns five seemingly unrelated murders surfacing in this quiet, humdrum town in the Texas Hill Country about 50 miles northwest of Austin. To the police and most citizens, the murders appear unrelated, but to two men they make perfect sense.
The second pressure began building fifty years earlier, during the height of World War II in Eastern Europe. Old European war wounds, both physical and mental, are still very much alive in many of the survivors of that war. Now, two of those survivors, both unrepentant Nazis, remember the man who stalked them and shot them and crippled them. If the shooter is still alive, they want him so they can watch him die very slowly and very painfully. And they have finally found the survivor in, of all unlikely places, Balcones, Texas.
After the first three murders, Chief Deputy Scotty Marie Wyatt, the 31-year-old female second-in-command Balcones policewoman, realizes a serial killer is stalking her town. Unfortunately, she can't get anyone else to believe her. Her theories make even less sense when she discovers that the killer appears to have hidden connections to Nazis and WW II Polish freedom fighters. What she can't know is that the shooter of the two Nazis was one of those Polish freedom fighters. Now, those same Nazis think the shooter is alive and lives in Balcones.
Chief Deputy Wyatt finds she must fight the hidden killer, the animosity of three male subordinates, an insecure male Sheriff, two vigilante groups, and an old friend who appears to be either the next victim ... or the killer.
That's when she discovers there are two killers instead of one, and neither killer knows of the other's presence. Even worse, Chief Deputy Wyatt knows neither killer will stop until he gets to the Last Name on the List.
"Last Name on the List" concerns ordinary people under extraordinary and confusing pressure. In the case of Balcones, there are two pressures. The first concerns five seemingly unrelated murders surfacing in this quiet, humdrum town in the Texas Hill Country about 50 miles northwest of Austin. To the police and most citizens, the murders appear unrelated, but to two men they make perfect sense.
The second pressure began building fifty years earlier, during the height of World War II in Eastern Europe. Old European war wounds, both physical and mental, are still very much alive in many of the survivors of that war. Now, two of those survivors, both unrepentant Nazis, remember the man who stalked them and shot them and crippled them. If the shooter is still alive, they want him so they can watch him die very slowly and very painfully. And they have finally found the survivor in, of all unlikely places, Balcones, Texas.
After the first three murders, Chief Deputy Scotty Marie Wyatt, the 31-year-old female second-in-command Balcones policewoman, realizes a serial killer is stalking her town. Unfortunately, she can't get anyone else to believe her. Her theories make even less sense when she discovers that the killer appears to have hidden connections to Nazis and WW II Polish freedom fighters. What she can't know is that the shooter of the two Nazis was one of those Polish freedom fighters. Now, those same Nazis think the shooter is alive and lives in Balcones.
Chief Deputy Wyatt finds she must fight the hidden killer, the animosity of three male subordinates, an insecure male Sheriff, two vigilante groups, and an old friend who appears to be either the next victim ... or the killer.
That's when she discovers there are two killers instead of one, and neither killer knows of the other's presence. Even worse, Chief Deputy Wyatt knows neither killer will stop until he gets to the Last Name on the List.
340 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 2, 2011
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