Harper's Bizarre (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781977259028)

Harper, Alabama, is one of those tiny college towns where nothing bad happens. The population blooms every fall with fresh young faces, the students bright and eager to learn, and settles back into a gentle hum each summer as the year-round residents are left to their gardening and barbeques.

Until, one day, that quiet breaks.

There is a senseless murder-and then more. And Police Chief Grady Noland is challenged to find what links a teenage friendship, a family's poisoning, a jailbreak, and an abusive ex-spouse. Can he, before someone else dies?

Author Mike Thorne, himself a professor in a sleepy college town for years, was inspired to write the crime novel Harper's Bizarre by two horrific murders in his hometown. In real life, they happened decades apart, but in his fiction, Thorne weaves them together to explore new possibilities of plot. Fans of Thorne's previous crime novel, Murder in Memory, will recognize Harper and some of the town's inhabitants.