The Killing of Strangers

"2004 St. Martin’s Press First Traditional Mystery Competition Finalist." Sam Haggard has every reason to believe that his life has run out in the Southern Ohio rust-belt city he calls home. Fired from his job as a security cop and dumped by his wife, he’s about as down as a man can get. Then he is offered the dubious assignment of guarding Crystal Jones, a woman who was at Kent State on May 4, 1970 — a then-radical whose activist husband, Lucifer, disappeared after the shootings, never to be seen again. Through her current fog of pills and alcohol, Crystal swears this dangerous man is alive, and trying to contact her. As Sam is drawn into her story, he finds himself reliving his own past — and also becoming increasingly involved with Crystal’s daughter, Corrie, a tough yet strangely tender representative of a very different generation. When terror strikes on Sam’s watch, he and Corrie find that they, too, are in danger. There is someone out there — someone who holds the answers to the long-buried secrets of Kent State. The kinds of secrets that have cost people their lives — and that now, 25 years later, are just as deadly as they ever were.