Chico's Doug Keister is fascinated by cemeteries and has published
guidebooks to some of the more prominent resting places. A few years ago he
discovered that as a novelist the cemetery settings could yield some most
interesting, uh, plots, especially if you have a cast of oddball characters dealing
with issues of national security. What has followed is a series of romps with historical
back stories and guidebook excerpts interwoven (complete with GPS coordinates).
The newest is "The Sleepy Hollow Mystery: A Chick Corbett
Yarn" ($9.95 in paperback from Doublewide Productions, www.douglaskeister.com;
also for Amazon Kindle). Chick makes his home with Uncle Ray in the desert town
of Gerlach, Nevada, only now the story finds them "high in the Limbo
Mountains about a hundred miles north of Reno."
They, along with "a three-legged border collie named
Phydeaux," on loan from sheepherder Elwood LeFoote, are there to take
pictures of a series of petroglyphs found in a cave.
It's the result of a request from Chick's best friend, Mensa-brilliant
six-foot-seven Tom Twotrees, a Paiute now working for the Pentagon. FBI agent
Desiree Depardieu, Chick's girlfriend, is helping Tom investigate a series of East
coast murders due to a gruesome human form of mad-cow disease. A strange symbol
is associated with the bodies, and that's what Chick and Uncle Ray are looking
for.
Add to the mix the Dark Shadows movie;
the fate of Michael Rockefeller (the fifth child of Nelson Rockefeller), who
may have been eaten by cannibals during an expedition to New Guinea; and some
pretty lurid descriptions of blood drinking.
There's a Nevada connection which leads to Artemus Collins, "Arterial
Artie," a man afflicted with hematomania, which is, as Uncle Ray explains,
"a craving, often sexual, to drink blood … human blood." Imprisoned
for murder, Artemus had escaped, vowing revenge against all those who had
wronged him. Triangulating the deaths leads our heroes to the Sleepy Hollow
Cemetery in New York (sleepyhollowcemetery.org), where Washington Irving is
buried.
And where Artie's attention turns, chillingly, to Chick and Desiree.
Keister delights in the intricacies of history and characters he has
come to love, and readers can be grateful for both.
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