Fiction, Mystery & Crime, Fiction Subjects

Code 61

Name: Code 61
Author: Donald Harstad
ISBN: 9780553580983

by Donald Harstad

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Overview

CODE 61: maintain radio silence. someone may be listening.

Investigating the apparent suicide of a colleague’s niece, Iowa Deputy Sheriff Carl Houseman is startled to uncover a group that transforms the dark fantasies of vampire legend into grisly reality: they ritualistically drink small amounts of one another’s blood. As Carl is drawn deeper into this unnerving world, it becomes clear that the dead woman may have been the victim of a twenty-first-century Dracula.

The prime suspect, Dan Peale, is a sinister presence within the group--a man some say drinks blood and never, ever dies. It’s an outlandish, heinous theory, but then suspicions are bolstered by rumors of a card-carrying vampire hunter who is also pursuing Peale. All too soon, Houseman finds himself scrambling to track a vampire--before he kills again.

Synopsis

With his dead-on depictions of the rural crime beat in such critically acclaimed novels as Eleven Days, Known Dead, and The Big Thaw, Donald Harstad proved himself to be a master of the police procedural and a keen observer of the intrigues and eccentricities of the American heartland.

Publishers Weekly

A call to a Peeping Tom incident starts Deputy Sheriff Carl Houseman on his strangest case yet in this nicely low-key but compelling page-turner. True, the Iowa lawman encountered Satanists in his debut, Eleven Days (1998), but the perp described hanging in thin air outside the upper story window looks like Bela Lugosi. When a body drained of blood is reported in a rural mansion, Houseman realizes this investigation isn't going to be routine, or easy. More bodies pile up, in Iowa and across the Mississippi in Wisconsin (with a fellow cop noting, "Vampire. Suspect that weird has to be from your side of the river"). Police radio chatter "Ten-four, Comm. 'I'll be ten-seventy-six to the scene'" and details of the manhunt could not be more authentic, since the author (Known Dead; The Big Thaw) spent 26 years in law enforcement. He even includes a glossary of ten codes for the curious. With laconic masterstrokes, Harstad complicates his plot with the arrival on the scene of a professional vampire hunter, problems with a disgruntled subordinate and Houseman's introduction to the sexual underworld of blood sports. Series regulars such as investigator Hester Gorse and Old Knockle do their turns, with officer Sally Wells copping the funniest moments why not bring some garlic on the stake-out, just in case? The suspect is supposed to be a vampire. Harstad has crafted another engrossing entry in one of the best new police procedural series. (Apr. 16) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

About the Author, Donald Harstad

DONALD HARSTAD is the author of Eleven Days, Known Dead, and The Big Thaw. A former deputy sheriff and twenty-six-year veteran of the Clayton County Sheriff’s Department, he lives in Elkader, Iowa.

From the Hardcover edition.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

Library Journal

Carl Houseman, primary detective for the Nation County Sheriff's Department, is called out to the apparent suicide of his boss's niece. After a careful crime scene investigation and a thorough autopsy, it is clear that Edie Younger could not have cut her own throat. The wound is very similar to that of a young man found dead in nearby Wisconsin. To complicate matters, the dead man's girlfriend had reported seeing a vampire-like creature outside her window. As Houseman and Iowa State Special Agent Hester Gorse grapple with people who actually believe that one of them is a real vampire, the story becomes a picture-perfect police procedural. Everything is here the painstaking search for evidence, the questioning of suspects and witnesses, the hours spent in the rain on stakeout, and the attention to the rules of law. This fourth book in the series by Harstad, a former deputy sheriff with 26 years of experience, is packed with suspense, heart-stopping action, and haunting scenes. For all fiction collections. Jo Ann Vicarel, Cleveland Heights-Univ. P.L., Ohio Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Fourth procedural featuring former Deputy Sheriff Harstad's gritty but amusing and warmhearted, middle-aged hero, Deputy Sheriff Carl Houseman. When Carl gets a signal to check on a female's report of an intruder, she tells him she saw a white-faced man with fangs floating outside her second-floor window. Next day, this same woman's boyfriend is found floating under a bridge, head bashed in and throat torn open. What ties white fangs to torn boyfriend? Next morning, still in bed, Carl gets a Code 61 call-a terse, circumspect radio communication that keeps people with police scanners from getting the message-that lends a spooky silence to his police radio as he drives to the crime. In a huge Victorian house, Carl absorbs the death scene before studying the bathtub's young, bruised female corpse-a knife lying beside her and her neck slashed with a wound almost too deep to be self-inflicted. She's Edith Younger, the niece of fellow cop Lamar, Carl's boss. But to sharp-eyed Carl, something isn't right: there's not enough blood. He partners with series regular Hester Gorse, State Special Agent, whose smarts have been applied to hundreds of homicides. News reports spread about Dracula visiting the county-and who should show up but William Chester, vampire hunter, with stake, mallet, garlic, and crucifix. Building on the medical examiner's wisdom, and on stains found on stairs, Hester and Carl slowly feed us a vast factual bag of crime scene detail that eventually leads to a band of deluded bloodrinkers led by extradelusional Dan Peale, who, like a good vampire, fears no bullet, especially when on methamphetamine and ecstasy. And perhaps he can fly as well, since this batty guy lives in adeserted mine. The same spellbinding detail that Harstad fans ate with relish in Carl's debut shocker, Eleven Days (1998)-where he was pitted against a satanic cult given to demonic atrocities. Yummy.