The Detectives

Like locked-room murder mysteries? Stories about impossible-to-solve crimes? Detectives who are out of the norm? The Detectives is a novella and several short stories about just such puzzles and the detectives who solve them. Set in various locations in the South and Southwest, all six start with the puzzle of how a murder happened, but quickly move on to the puzzle of the detectives themselves and how they deal with the crime. How do normal people suddenly deal with seemingly unsolvable puzzles? And how does that change them?
The novella is about an ex-basketball player female agent with the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation who is assigned to assist a small beach town where a body is found in a locked-from-the-inside "hurricane-proof house" just off the beach. How it was done is quickly solved, but who did it when most people had no reason or opportunity to kill the guy is much more of a problem.
Other stories involve a rookie detective in Virginia facing the case of a young college teacher who dies sitting alone on the end of a small fishing pier in plain sight of witnesses on the shore, and a Hispanic female chief detective in Yuma, Arizona, taking over the case of a young man shot and stabbed inside an empty locked jail cell inside an empty prison from the 1800s. This is followed by a police captain with a "Dolly Parton" figure dealing with two orphan college women found nude with a claymore thrust through their bodies inside a locked University of Arizona Baptist Student Union building, and a medically retired detective asked to help solve the case of an elderly college professor repeatedly stabbed inside her own locked apartment in faculty housing in the mountains of Kentucky. The final story concerns an ex-football lineman turned amateur detective in Atlanta and a young accountant who disappears from her own locked apartment several stories above the street. In each case, the detectives must draw on their own lives and experiences to figure out what really happened and why. In these cases, it is the people who are the real puzzle, not the crime.