Dead Beat

by Candy Justice

“During those two terrifying months, I was glad I had quit piano lessons in the third grade.”Someone is murdering Memphis musicians, and once again, thirty-something and single newspaper columnist Britt Faire lands in the middle of the investigation. When former 60s girl group do-wopper and long-time Memphian Saundra Barkley is found murdered, the case makes major waves. Britt decides to write a column about her unusual career, but when she interviews Barkley’s friends and family she is surprised by how many of them are willing to speak ill of the dead. Suddenly there seems to be no shortage of motives for the singer’s murder.But when a young rapper named Mutha Boy is found dead with a steak knife in the back soon after, the parallels between the two musicians’ deaths cause a stir. Is there a serial killer stalking Memphis musicians?Britt finds herself again pulled into a major criminal investigation, but this time, the killer knows exactly who she is--and where she lives. Readers will once again be charmed by Britt’s sense of humor and caught up in her amateur investigation—as well as her tangle of romantic interests. Candy Justice has written another laugh-out-loud funny, lock-your-deadbolt creepy mystery you'll want to devour in an afternoon. Candy Justice, a former newspaper reporter and national magazine writer, now is a journalism professor at the University of Memphis.

277 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 18, 2018

About the author

When I was 16, I played the spoons in a washtub band on a nationally televised talent show — sort of a low-rent American Idol. When a lucrative spoons career did not materialize, I went to college (Ole Miss and University of Memphis) and became a journalist and later a college professor.
As a reporter and then columnist at a metro daily newspaper, The Memphis Press-Scimitar, along with being a wife and mother of two children, I didn't have time or creative energy left over for fiction writing. Still, the many fascinating people and events I covered as a reporter stuck with me and would eventually give me much material for fiction writing.
My first mystery, which was the fourth novel I wrote and the first book in the Britt Faire mystery series, came about when I got a phone call at my office at the University of Memphis, where I teach journalism. It was the mother of a man who had been murdered a couple of years before. The case has never been solved, and the mother was desperately hoping my students and I would take it on as a reporting project and find out who killed her son. I sympathized but had to tell her that my students and I were not equipped to help her.
However, I wondered what would have happened if I had gotten that phone call while I was still a reporter — I just might have taken it on. After all, reporters are a lot like detectives, using many of the same investigative methods and knowing many people in high and low places. That’s how Pre-Marital Murder was born.
I love many genres of books, but I am an avid reader of mysteries. I learned from reading Nancy Drew books when I was a kid that a good mystery isn’t too slow — it has many plot turns to keep the reader interested, and it has a satisfying ending. From Jane Austen, I learned that a bit of humor and romance makes a novel fun. And from many wonderful writers, I discovered that interesting characters are just as essential for commercial fiction as they are for literary fiction.