Bent Dead In Beloit: A Mystery

by Tom McBride

Beloit is an old Wisconsin river town with a colorful history, industrial ingenuity, and famed college. Jeremy Dropsky and Roger Webb are partners in the Beloit police force, but they could hardly be more different. Jeremy is a hyper-logical loner, a failed college student, and a devotee of his little cat Dez. Roger is instinctual, married, good-looking, and in great need of becoming a hero. But they like each other a lot. Together they do the good work of Beloit cops, which includes cooling domestic fights, eradicating meth houses, and dealing with the obsessive resentments of Rose, the department’s administrative head. Then one day they are called to investigate what may actually be a non-event: an alleged Peeping Tom in a fashionable section of east Beloit. As they investigate what Jeremy thinks is nothing at all, and what Roger thinks is a sinister plot, they encounter a strange mixture of expensive candy, fractured marriage—and uncanny murder. BENT DEAD IN BELOIT explores the fateful relationship between Jeremy and Roger as they encounter a world that seems to make no sense—until it does, and then it’s far too late. Here is a fascinating story of mystery and despair, heroism and love.

188 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 7, 2017

About the author

Tom McBride is a professor of English, and Keefer and Keefer Professor of Humanities at Beloit, where he was also the long-time director of the colleges first year students program. Ron Nief is the former Public Affairs director of Beloit College who developed the Mindset List in 1998."

Reviews

[Jerry Peterson · Rating 1 out of 5]

I bought McBride’s book because I’m a crime writer and McBride, the author of four other mysteries, was going to be talking about this one at the Beloit library. I wanted to be in his audience, to hear what he had to say.

I missed it. Darn.

But maybe that was just as well because Bent Dead in Beloit isn’t a very good read. A mystery? That comes up in the last third of the book. Finally.

The last third.

That’s a long time to wait, and most readers of mysteries wouldn't.

The first two thirds center on the humdrum lives of two cops—detectives and partners—in a small city. Rather boring.

Worse, one of the partners, Jeremy Dropsky, consults his cat on crimes in the city, his cat who prowls the city at night. Consulting one’s cat, clever?

No, just strange.