Murder Once Removed

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Lucy Lancaster is a genealogist, but she bills herself as an ancestry detective. In the age of DNA testing, everyone wants to know who their ancestors are and she is busier than ever. In Murder Once Removed by S.C. Perkins, Austin, Texas billionaire Gus Halloran has hired Lucy to discover who murdered his great-great-grandfather Seth in 1849. (Murder Once Removed will be published on March 19 by Minotaur Books.)

She has also assembled a family tree for Gus that stretches back into the 1840s. Fortunately Texas kept good records. When Seth Halloran died in 1849, his widow pleaded with the authorities to prove it was murder, but they brushed her off as an hysterical widow. While researching, Lucy finds a photographer named Jeb Inscore who witnessed the crime and photographed the body.

Now with the aid of the granddaughter of the photographer, Lucy tracks down actual photos of the scene. Not really photos but daguerrotypes - photos printed on silver-coated copperplates and essentially very fragile and sensitive to light.

Lucy also finds a diary left by Jeb Inscore with an entry describing seeing two men standing over the

body. After they left, he took the photo of the body, but suddenly the killers returned with a horse and trod over Seth's body. They also threatened Jeb. In his journal Jeb wrote the initials of the murderer were C.A. and mentioned that C.A. was a member of the Texas Legislature. This leads to Lucy to two possible suspects - Caleb Applewhite or Cantwell Ayers.

With this new information, Lucy is free to fly. Unfortunately Gus is an impatient man and has had a long-running feud with Senator Daniel Applewhite, who is running against Gus' son for the Senate seat.

An impromptu press conference gets Lucy into trouble as Gus accuses the Applewhite family of killing his great-great grandfather and exposing the existence of the nearly priceless daguerrotypes which in turn leads to a murder.

This is the first in an engaging and timely series featuring spunky Lucy Lancaster and hunky FBI Agent Ben Turner.