Police Stories

Final Payment (Posadas County #15)

Name: Final Payment (Posadas County #15)
Author: Steven F Havill
ISBN: 9781590588765

by Steven F. Havill

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Overview

The rugged Cat Mesa country north of the village of Posadas is hosting the first annual Posadas 100, a cycle-cross bicycle race that promises to attract more than 140 competitors. Despite enough injuries during the pre-race practice to promise a spectacular and dangerous race, Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman has even more pressing concerns on her mind. Someone has been using Jerry Turner's big Cessna 206 and then returning it to its hangar at the Posadas airport. Did the airplane end up in Mexico?

Estelle has worries at home as well. Facing his first public piano recital, her prodigiously talented seven-year-old son is stubbornly refusing to tell anyone what he plans to play, and it's making everyone, including his music teacher, very nervous. The day of the big race brings a tragedy that doesn't look like an accident, and as the investigation continues, puzzling connections surface deep in Mexico.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

In Havill's satisfying fifth Posadas County puzzler (after 2006's Statute of Limitations), undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman and her colleagues discover three Hispanics shot to death, execution-style, at a remote New Mexico airstrip. Judging by the victims' soft hands, well-dressed appearance and airborne arrival, these are no ordinary illegals, and it's up to the sheriff's department to determine who's behind the crime. Meanwhile, a local reports his plane as having logged unexplained airtime. A Mexican exchange student's watercolor artwork lends the first clue to the puzzle, and the resulting answer astounds even the well-seasoned undersheriff. Estelle suspects she knows the next victim, and her attempt to stop the death toll lands her face-to-face with this calculating killer. Havill takes the reader through an all-terrain investigation to an edge-of-your-seat finale. (June)

Kirkus Reviews

A concert, a bike race and three dead bodies-it's all business as usual for Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman of Posadas County, NM. Small, out of the way, rural, but about as bucolic as Baghdad: that's Posadas County. And fans know full well it's no place for law enforcement officers who can't work sleep-deprived. Beautiful, bright, resourceful Undersheriff Guzman is on edge about both the likelihood of bruised and battered bodies littering the untamed back country as the result of a much publicized 100-mile bicycle race, and her 7-year-old prodigy Francisco, scheduled to make his debut as a concert pianist later that evening. Now, upping the ante, comes a call from Bobby Torrez, her boss. "A triple," he says cryptically. Two males and a female, apparently members of the same family, have been shot to death. The victims seem to be illegals, but they're dressed too well to be day laborers, reasons Estelle. Moreover, the manner in which they arrived at their final destination-an airplane piloted away by their executioner-suggests that up until the moment they were killed, they had options unavailable to most migrant workers. Who were these strangers? What was their lethal link to Posasdas County? The answers are complicated and hard to get, and Estelle will almost die trying. Less local color means a lesser entry in what's still a very good series (Statute of Limitations, 2006, etc.).