Westobou Gold (Moccasin Hollow Mystery – 2) by Hawk MacKinney
The Indian Queen would risk torture and worse to keep her secrets from these barbarians in suits of metal and their search for cities of gold. They never found the gold. Empires rose; empires fell, the centuries passed. Legend became fireside myths, but no treasure was ever found. Yet, among the grey-green drapes of wisteria and wild jasmine along the misty shrouded lowlands of bayous and marshes of the Westo River, the folktales persist.
In the lazed creep of a near-tropical dawn lit the pungent Turkish coffee permeates Moccasin Hollow. Beyond the kitchen door Lucky, Craige Ingram’s German shepherd gnaws a favorite bone. Looted burial mounds seem a world away until plundered mounds on Moccasin Hollow land brings amateur archaeologist PI Craige Ingram into the cross-hairs of kidnapping. Stealthy hideaways are concealed in old colonial brick-lined river grottoes beneath the big house of Ardochy plantation. Sex-tape underage blackmail and thrill killings on federal land spur a medical examiner’s preliminary postmortem to more than a hired cleaner’s quickie cover-up passed off as drug deals gone sour. Greed tangles a witch’s pigswill of illicit affairs and murder-to-hide-murder. Shady investigators and shadier politics stir an unexpected concoction that threatens the lives of those at Moccasin Hollow in a spiteful plot against ex-SEAL Craige Ingram and the woman he loves.
Hawk MacKinney
Internationally acclaimed author and public speaker, Hawk MacKinney began writing mysteries for his school newspapers. He served in the US Navy Reserve for over 20 years, and was a tenured faculty member at several state medical facilities, teaching postgraduate courses in both the United States and Jerusalem, Israel. Since retiring Hawk has authored several novels that have received national and international recognition. Moccasin Trace, a historical novel, was nominated for the prestigious Michael Shaara Award for Excellence in Civil War Fiction and the Writers Notes Book Award. The Cairns of Sainctuarie, his science fiction series, includes The Bleikovat Event and The Missing Planets, with a third book in the works. Hawk’s latest project focuses on The Moccasin Hollow Mystery Series. Book 1 in the series, Hidden Chamber of Death, was released early 2016.
Guest Posts
Hawk MacKinney is an internationally acclaimed author and public speaker. A retired U.S. Navy officer, Hawk was on the postdoctoral faculties in the states and England, as well as the Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem.
Hawk writes across several genres that includes another mystery/thriller series—The Craige Ingram Mystery Series, and his science fiction series, The Cairns of Sainctuarie: Volume 1 – The Bleikovat Event, and Volume 2 – The Missing Planets. His historical romance, Moccasin Trace, was nominated for the prestigious Michael Shaara Award for Excellence in Civil War Fiction and the Writers Notes Book Award, and is the prequel tale of the family bloodlines of his retired Navy SEAL/part-time private investigator protagonist, Craige Ingram, in the Moccasin Hollow Mystery Series.
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The greed-driven double-double-crosses in Westobou Gold takes Craige Ingram from his South Carolina ancestral home of Moccasin Hollow to the underbelly of dirty backrooms and violence against loved ones with “fiction” often more fact than whimsy. The psychotic lives among us. Treacherous beasts, making their own reality/rules, leaving one with a sense of being naked prey, blending with John/Jane Doe-on-the-street, sometimes as close as the head on the pillow next to us. The twists in the tales within Westobou Gold, Book 2 of the Moccasin Hollow Mystery Series, is the night-horse haints-and-specters of fear-come-into-daylight, and sucks the reader into the unexpected.
As a “Southron,” I write from the heart. My characters have a part of me in each of them. Mark Twain said, “Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.”
Hawk lives along the deceptively lazy river of the Westos.
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