The Peter Bay

by Randy Pierce, Joe Lee (Editor)

Three years after returning to his hometown of Leakesville, Mississippi, to speak at the funeral of childhood friend Brandon Smallwood, Grant Hicks is again asked home, this time by a retired judge who says that a man accused of capital murder might be innocent. Grant, now married and a managing partner of his law firm in Atlanta, insists he’s a civil litigator and wouldn’t know how to handle a criminal case. But when the accused turns out to be Grant’s childhood friend Ben Petty, he gets involved. The evidence against Petty, though circumstantial, is convincing, and the Petty legal team—which includes a veteran criminal attorney fighting to stay sober and a retired investigator never without his trademark cowboy hat—concedes they’ll do well to spare their client from execution. They catch a break when Grant learns that the only witness to the murder (the victim’s niece, a young girl with Down Syndrome) was never interviewed by local law enforcement. But what changes everything is a seemingly unrelated string of murders that Grant’s investigator is still looking into when the Petty jury announces the verdict. And when Grant’s wife Jade disappears, he realizes too late that a serial killer was in their midst all along and may have struck again. A classic Southern thriller and a worthy sequel to Pain Unforgiven, author Randy Pierce again brings Grant Hicks back to south Mississippi to fight the good fight and, in doing so, learn a lot about himself and the fascinating mix of good and bad people who populate the place he’s finally ready to call home.

280 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 26, 2016