
Part of Series
Will a string of mysterious trespassing incidents give Rookie Officer Ed Solomon his chance at being a big-time detective? Gordon Hepler and Ed Solomon are reminiscing at Finnegan's bar one snowy night, about a case that turned Gordon's career path around and had Solomon rethinking his desires to be a big-city detective. Back then, Gordon had no intentions of being a cop, and Ed was a greener-than-green rookie police officer being trained by Arch Hepler, Gordon's father. In most places, people breaking into garden and storage sheds might not be a big deal, but in the small town of Mapleton, Colorado, it's a veritable crime wave, at least according to Chief Dixon. Kids playing pranks? Or something more serious? Could these trespassers have something to do with a much bigger, big-city crime? What starts out as a perfunctory investigation soon escalates. Will Dixon, Arch Hepler, and new rookie Solomon discover the truth before Mapleton sees its first homicide in decades? Deadly Assumptions, a cross between a cozy mystery and a police procedural, is the seventh offering in Terry Odell's Mapleton Mystery series. It, like all the others, can be read as a stand alone.
Author

Terry Odell was born in Los Angeles and after living several decades in Florida now makes her home in Colorado. An avid reader (her parents tell everyone they had to move from their first home because she finished the local library), she always wanted to "fix" stories so the characters did what she wanted, in books, television, and the movies. Once she began writing, she found this wasn't always possible, as evidenced when the mystery she intended to write rapidly became a romance. However, her entry into the world of writing can be attributed to a "mistake" when her son mentioned the Highlander television series on a visit home. Being the "good mother" she began watching the show and soon connected with the world of fanfiction, first as a reader, then as a critique giver, and then, one brave weekend, she wrote her first short story. Things snowballed (if one can use that analogy in central Florida!) and soon she was writing her first original novel. Much later, she mentioned something about a recent Highlander episode to her son, and he said, "Oh, I've never actually watched the show, I just thought the concept was cool." Little did he know what he'd started. "