Death Down Home Author:Eve K. Sandstrom Death Down Home introduces the delightful detecting team of Sam and Nicky Titus, the newest and most unlikely residents of Holton, in Oklahoma's ranch country. — Sam grew up in HOlton, but he hasn't been home for five years. His easy explanation for staying away is that he's been pursuing a successful career as an officer in the army's Criminal ... more »Investigation Division. But a long-standing dispute with his father, Big Sam, is the real reason for his absence.
Nicky, too, has had her fill of small-town ways and small-town people. One year of junior high school in her mother's Alabama hometown was enough to make Nicky vow never again to cross the limits of a metropolis of fewer than 100,000 souls. A general's daughter, she much prefers the glamour of New York and Paris to the grit and grime of life in rural ranchland.
But marriage to Sam threatens to change Nicky's life in more ways than she had anticipated. She and Sam have just returned from their honeymoon to their quarters in Frankfurt, Germany, when the transatlantic phone rings. His father has had an "accident" and lies desperately ill in an Oklahoma City intensive care unit. Sam must fly home immediately, and Nicky decides to go with him.
Sam's mother, Marty, needs Sam at his father's bedside, and Sam needs to see for himself what happened to Big Sam. The local sheriff insists it was an accident, but Sam knows better. He's sure somebody tried to murder his father. Until the potential killer is found, nobody in the Titus family can feel completely safe--not even Nicky.
Impressed by both the beauty and the forbidding loneliness of the Great Plains, frightened by the changes in her life that have come too fast, Nicky struggles to find a way to help Sam and to reaffirm her new and vulnerable marriage.
With its vivid setting and memorable characters, Death Down Home marks the impressive debut of a witty and winning new series and a superbly talented new mystery author.« less