The Swamp Yankee Mysteries

Gus Haddock never expected to take over as chief of police in tiny Little Penwick, Rhode Island—the smallest town in the smallest state—while his father Julius sat in jail, framed by the corrupt state Attorney General. Fresh off three tours with the Army Rangers and battling PTSD, Gus dives into his first case: the mysterious disappearance of a local fishing boat captain and his 40-foot trawler on a freezing January night.

Finally out of jail after tangling with a corrupt state Attorney General, Julius Haddock—the retired police chief of tiny Little Penwick, Rhode Island—is drifting through his days with a brand-new private investigator's license burning a hole in his pocket. Bored and restless, he decides to crack open the town's oldest cold case: the thirty-year-old murder of a sixteen-year-old girl who pedaled off on her bike one summer morning to work at the local farm stand… and never arrived. They found her body the next day, but the evidence was thin then and thinner now.

Life in Little Penwick, Rhode Island, is finally feeling manageable for Police Chief Gus Haddock—until he's nearly run down while out for an early-morning jog, and days later someone blasts out the glass doors of his police station. Customs and Immigration confirm the worst: Janine Stone, the elusive Glitter Girl who slipped away at the end of Gus's last big case, has slipped back into the country.

Retired police chief and new private eye Julius Haddock is enjoying the quiet life in the small Rhode Island seaside town of Little Penwick when the brutal murder of Rhode Island Attorney General Preston Knox shatters the peace. The high-profile killing happens just weeks before Knox’s expected election as Governor, and Julius’s own rocky history with the victim casts suspicion his way. But he has an alibi and the outgoing Governor taps the veteran cop for the state police task force investigating the murder.

It’s 1924 and John Edward Haddock, a young man with a fine reputation as a merchant marine at home on the sea, is offered an opportunity to make a cool thousand dollars … one half of his annual salary. All he has to do is drive the Black Duck, the fastest powerboat in Narragansett Bay, out to Rum Row, just outside the three-mile territorial limit of the USA, pick up a load of contraband liquor (it’s Prohibition) and sneak it back ashore under the watchful eye of the U.S. Coast Guard patrols. John Edward, the forefather of the Haddock clan of Little Penwick, has a lot to lose.