In his inaugural adventure, Elias Hackshaw, the wry and irascible editor of a small-town upstate New York weekly newspaper, finds himself reluctantly investigating the death of a local farmer. Hack’s half-hearted snooping soon leads him to unscrupulous land developers, then to an eccentric millionaire, angry Indians, and, finally, a scheme (his own) to use old Iroquois artifacts to “salt” an archeological dig – but only as a way to lure the killer out into the open, he assures us. Any personal gain on Hackshaw’s part is, ahem, strictly serendipitous.

Genre: Mystery