Walker, Mary Willis

The Red Scream

In this 1995 winner of the Edgar Award for best mystery novel, crime reporter Molly Cates has chronicled the exploits of Louie Bronk, a brutal serial killer scheduled for execution, for her first book. With his execution just a few days away, Molly decides to write the closing chapter on her disturbing relationship with the man known as the Texas Scalper. Strangely, both her boss and the husband of the woman whose murder got Bronk the death penalty pressure her to back off the story. When she receives a chilling anonymous letter and another body is found, she begins to suspect that Bronk is not the killer at all. Her quest for the truth, she discovers, not only discredits her work, but places her own life on the line.

Texas-based crime reporter Molly Cates has just  published her first book, describing the  blood-curdling exploits of serial killer Louie Bronk. Now on  death row, Louie's sentence is about to be carried  out. Molly will be there as a witness, and she  wants to write about it--the final coda to Louie's  story. But suddenly, she's being strongly  discouraged by her boss at the Lone Star  Monthly and by Charlie McFarland, the millionaire  real estate developer whose first wife, Tiny, was  Bronk's most famous victim--and the only one whose  murder is a capital offense. Then Molly starts to  receive dark hints that Louie may not have killed  Tiny after all. There is another murder following  Louis's M.O.--one he could not have committed.  The veracity of Molly's book is threatened--and then  her very life. Caught between a rock and a hard  place, Molly realizes that by attempting to save  Louis she is putting her own life on the line, and  discrediting her own work. Mary Willis Walker brings  a lusty new voice to the mystery scene. Already  recognized for her first novel, she has now created  a character just cheeky and gusty enough to take  her place among the top ranks of female  protagonists such as Kinsey Millhone and Kay Scarpetta.

Zero at the Bone: A Mystery

Katherine Driscoll is just three weeks away from disaster: foreclosure on her home and business, even the sale of her beloved dog.  She has no hope of raising the $91,000 she so desperately needs--until the father she hasn't seen for thirty years writes to her, offering her enough money to solve her problems...if she will do one thing in return.

But Katherine may never learn what that is.  When she arrives in Austin, she is hours too late: her father has died in a bizarre accident.  As she sifts through the cryptic notes he left behind, she finds herself caught up in terrible family secrets--and a deadly illicit trade.  The more she learns, the more determined she becomes to prove her father's death was no accident.  In doing so, Katherine will make a bitter enemy--one desperate enough to kill...and perhaps, kill again.

Under the Beetle's Cellar

The author and heroine of The Red  Scream return in a novel so terrifying, so  filled with squirming suspense, it's bound for the  bestseller lists. When Kirkus  Reviews greeted Mary Willis Walker's last book,  The Red Scream, with "welcome  to the big time," they weren't kidding. That  novel established Walker as an author with  "the kind of clout that sets publishers' mouths  watering" (The Philadelphia  Inquirer). And now she has done it again, with an  unforgettable tale ripped from the headlines and  more terrifying than our worst nightmares. Kidnapped  by a cult of religious fanatics, an Austin school  bus driver and eleven of his young charges have  been held underground at the group's highly  fortified compound for forty-six days. While a team of  federal negotiators begins to lose all hope of  rescuing the hostages, crime reporter Molly Cates sets  outto discover everything she can about the cult's  iron-willed leader, Samuel Mordecai. And as  the clock ticks inexorably, she takes the role of  Clarisse Starling opposite Mordecai's Hannibal Lecter,  engaging in a psychological confrontation as  harrowing as any in The Silence Of  The Lambs. Tough, terrifying, and relentlessly  heart-wrenching, this is a novel whose images no reader will  ever forget.

All the Dead Lie Down

Quotations from Mother Goose and Macbeth (as well as the Emily Dickinson snippet of the title) provide the chapter headings in this engaging novel of suspense. The apparent peculiarity of such juxtaposition brings home the brutality of those childhood rhymes and the dangers of obsession and revenge. Both serve Mary Willis Walker's purpose well in setting up this tightly constructed mystery in which investigative journalist Molly Cates's own obsession with her father's untimely death from 30 years before gets mixed up in a current and far more dangerous scheme to release chemical gases into the Senate chamber of the Texas Capitol. The two plots, the first a traditional mystery, the second more a tale of suspense, are unconnected except for Cates's involvement; she is obviously central to one and initially only tangential to the other. Such a device would have proved unwieldy in less skillful hands, but in Walker's case the disparate strands are brought together beautifully, and Cates has a suitable sense of her own fallibility and the difficulty of harboring hate for the better part of a generation.

Walker's previous three novels have won six mystery-writers awards among them. All the Dead Lie Down is solid enough to continue the tradition set by the others. Within it there is much to relish: sensitive consideration of homelessness, thought-provoking questions about gun control, and a wry appreciation for the charm and arrogance of the Lone Star State and its citizens ("Texans do not scrimp on stars."). Indeed, Walker's sense of place--from Lubbock's dust and dry desolation to Austin's trendiness and political maneuvering--is sure and confident. There are moments when the worst of the perpetrators of the chemical weapons scare is portrayed simplistically, but this is more than made up for by the complexity of the other characters: the vagrants who discover the danger as well as the ghosts, both past and present, who haunt Molly in her investigations of her father's past. An excellent read, for even the most jaded of mystery lovers.

Mary Willis Walker's first novel, Zero at the Bone, won both the Agatha and Macavity Awards and was nominated for an Edgar.  Her second, The Red Scream, won the Edgar Award for Best Novel of 1994.  Her third, Under the Beetle's Cellar, won the Hammett Prize, the Macavity Award, and the Agatha Award for 1995.  

Now she returns with All the Dead Lie Down, an emotionally charged double mystery that puts her definitively in the class of other outstanding crime writers whose work has joined the ranks of bestselling mainstream fiction.  

When true-crime reporter Molly Cates's father died more than twenty-five years ago, his death was ruled a suicide, and Molly's efforts to prove otherwise led to nothing but anguish and the breakup of her family.  Now, with access to new information, she is determined to reopen the investigation, but the answers she finds are devastating and leave her with an even more difficult moral dilemma.  To make matters worse, while caught up in her own misery, Molly becomes aware of a terrifying plot to kill everyone in the Texas state legislature--a conspiracy only she will be able to stop, if she can get there in time!

Once again, Mary Willis Walker has written an extraordinary mystery that will thrill listeners to the core.  All the Dead Lie Down is as rich in character and emotion as it is in plot and heart-stopping suspense.  

UNDER THE BEETLE'S CELLAR

Zero at the Bone

Under the Beetle's Cellar (Charnwood Library)

Under the Beetle's Cellar

The Red Scream

All the Dead Lie Down (Charnwood Library)