This excellent novel takes place in Syracuse NY in 1988, and has been nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Mystery. Maddie Dare is a twenty-something journalist. Well, maybe “journalist” is a stretch: she writes fluff pieces for the town newspaper. A typical assignment: recipes involving cream of mushroom soup and packages of frozen vegetables. Her loving husband comes from a farming family of sour Yankees who don’t mince words, especially if they’re sharp words aimed in Maddie’s direction.

Maddie misses her husband who travels full-time with the railroads, working on some sort of invention for them. This leaves her at loose ends in the boring town of Syracuse that she has come to hate. Sometimes she cannot believe that a former debutante like herself could end up coasting into such a backwater. Perhaps she’s following the example of her parents, both from families of impeccable social standing, who frittered away their wealth. Maddie has never taken the social registry thing too seriously, but she does miss the opportunities that money can provide.

So we have a smart and restless character with too much time on her hands: a recipe for trouble. Almost immediately Maddie finds it in the form of evidence linked to a double-murder that happened almost 20 years ago during the swinging Sixties. It is one of Syracuse’s most baffling cold-cases. Apparently, someone murdered two young women who were attending the town fair. One girl was blond, and the other was brunette. The killer posed their dead bodies in a cornfield: lying face-up, hand in hand, with crowns of roses on their heads. It’s as if a Brothers Grimm fairy tale had been recreated.

All this is fascinating, especially to Maddie who is bored out of her mind. But the clincher that involves her almost against her will is the evidence itself: a set of military dog-tags found in the cornfield. Several witnesses at the fair had put the girls in the company of two soldiers who were shipping out to Vietnam. But the actual dog-tags that Maddie regards in horrified wonder years later are printed with the name of her favorite cousin, Lapthorne. Hardly the most common name. And her cousin did serve in Vietnam.

The dog-tags are the fateful clue that forces Maddie’s hand and compels her to re-investigate the old crime. How can she not? She knows her cousin could not have had anything to do with the murders. At the same time, the farmer who found the dog-tags may turn the evidence in to the police. Her cousin could end up in prison if she can’t clear his name. Anyway, how much risk could be involved in digging into some old news stories and maybe interviewing some people who remember the old town fair? It might even be fun to act like a real investigative reporter.

Poor Maddie is about to get swept into dangerous waters closing way over her head: the one who murdered the two girls is a serial killer who has been selectively practicing his craft over the years. He has a thing for macabre fairy tales: the stories determine how he selects, kills, and then poses the dead bodies of his victims. When her questions bring her to his attention, it opens up a nightmarish world for Maddie in which any one of several colorful suspects could end her life in a gruesome way!

A Field of Darkness can be found on Amazon through this link: A Field of Darkness