Truman Smith

PI Truman Smith has become a loner after failing to find his sister Jan during a recent search of Galveston Island. He jogs on the Seawall, plays with his cat, and reads lots of Faulkner books. He is pulled from his self-imposed retirement when his old high school football buddy Dino asks him to find a young girl named Sharon. As Tru begins his investigation, dead bodies begin to appear and Tru himself is attacked.

After he failed to find his missing sister, whose remains finally turned up in a bag in an overgrown field, Texas PI Truman Smith retired to become a housepainter on Galveston Island. But when an alligator is killed and its carcass left on display on a family friend's property, Tru is persuaded to search for the culprit. Soon the brooding gumshoe is stumbling over the bodies of dead humans, is shot at and run down by a souped-up four-by-four as he's embroiled in a plot complete with crooked police, a possible land-grabbing sheme and assorted "bad guys".

In this enjoyable fourth series entry, Galveston PI Truman Smith (When Old Men Die, 1994) is hired by Lance Garrison, his still unpleasant but now rich high-school classmate, to investigate the shooting of a prairie chicken (really a kind of grouse) on Garrison's federally protected land in Picketville, Tex. Smith reluctantly agrees, largely because his high-school sweetheart, Anne Lindeman, now lives in Picketville.

In Murder Takes a Break, Galveston, Texas principal investigator Truman Smith loathes missing person cases because they either end up badly for his clients, or the person does not want to be found. So only as a personal favor to his friend Dino would Tru accept the case of missing college student, Randall Kirbo, who disappeared in the area while on Spring break nine months ago.