Nominated for the Shamus Award for Best First Private Eye Novel PI Truman Smith has become a loner after failing to find his sister Jan during a recent search of Galveston Island. He jogs on the Seawall, plays with his cat, and reads lots of Faulkner books. He is pulled from his self-imposed retirement when his old high school football buddy Dino asks him to find a young girl named Sharon. As Tru begins his investigation, dead bodies begin to appear and Tru himself is attacked. His search for Sharon takes him to all sorts of interesting places on and near the Island. Bill Crider spins a good mystery tale in a wonderful setting with interesting characters and enough plot twists to keep readers guessing until the last few chapters.

After he failed to find his missing sister, whose remains finally turned up in a bag in an overgrown field, Texas PI Truman Smith retired to become a housepainter on Galveston Island. But when an alligator is killed and its carcass left on display on a family friend's property, Tru is persuaded to search for the culprit. Soon the brooding gumshoe is stumbling over the bodies of dead humans, is shot at and run down by a souped-up four-by-four as he's embroiled in a plot complete with crooked police, a possible land-grabbing sheme and assorted "bad guys".

Truman Smith is happily fishing off a Galveston pier when his friend Dino seeks him out and asks for some help: Outside Harry, an old-timer with connections to Dino's family, is missing. Smith doesn't want to have anything to do with it; the last time he looked for a missing person the outcome left something to be desired. But Dino has a way of being persuasive, and Tru promises to give it a day or two. When the first person he questions is murdered, and when he himself is shot at, Truman Smith is reminded of all the reasons he hates missing person cases. But he's committed now: Outside Harry's life is in his hands, and Smith is going to see to it that if Harry has any secrets he wants to tell, he won't have to take them to an early grave.

That Truman Smith was sitting in a frayed lawn chair reading an old paperback copy of Tobacco Road was not remarkable. And strange as it sounds, it wasn't particularly noteworthy that someone wanted Smith to look into the murder of a prairie chicken; after all, he'd investigated and solved the murder of an alligator, hadn't he? The Attwater's Prairie Chicken isn't really a chicken, it's a grouse. And there are only about 108 of them in the world. The murdered bird was on Lance Garrison's land, and part of his deal with the government was that the small flock would be protected. Garrison's wealth - and his radio station - made him a likely target for trouble, but this was unexpected. Also unexpected was the reason the prairie chicken was killed ... and all the deaths that were to follow, and not of other endangered species. Some people in Picketville, Texas, had decided that Truman Smith endangered them and that he had to be stopped. The result was a deadly game of chicken, with Smith everyone's favorite target.

Galveston p.i. Truman Smith, as reluctant as ever, takes on the search for a missing college student, even though Smith has bad memories of his missing persons cases. Still, when Dino asks, Tru listens.The missing person is a boy who went on spring break and never came home. Right now it appears that he's the lucky one, because as Truman discovers—after he accepts the case, of course—other student isn't just missing...she's dead "For pure fun and sheer entertainment, it doesn't get much better than Crider's Tru Smith stories. Highly recommended". — Booklist "Crider turns out finely crafted, engaging mysteries". — The Armchair Detective