Created by Jerold Last
If you were expecting Frances Crane’s Pat and Jean Abbott, you’d be wrong. This is a more modern itineration. Plus dogs!
Former patent attorney and police officer ROGER BOWMAN and UCLA biochemist SUZANNE FOSTER are boyfriend/girlfriend visiting Montevideo, Uruguay, when we first meet them in The Ambivalent Corpse (2011), but by the second book, The Surreal Killer (2011), they’re married and have returned to their home base of Los Angeles. By the third novel, The Matador Murders (2012), they’ve got an infant son, Robert. Soon enough, they hire a male nanny, Bruce, to take care of their son, and shortly after, in The Deadly Dog Show (2013), they go to the dogs, literally, becoming obsessed with German Shorthaired Pointers.
So far they’re appeared in a slew of self-published novels and short fiction.
As couples go, Roger and Suzanne are pleasantly tolerable and comfortably well-off, a couple of sophisticated upper middle class bon vivants living the good life in SoCal, although their adventures take them all over, particularly to South America, although they range as far as the Galapagos Islands and Great Britain.
More cozy than hard-boiled, the books and stories are full of talk of food, travel, German Shorthaired Pointers (annoyingly referred to as “GST”s) and occasionally some—READER ALERT!—truly gawd-awful puns.
So we’re not exactly in kiss-kiss bang-bang territory here—the author himself considers the books “tweeners,”meaning they’re “tough mystery stories that follow the cozy conventions of no graphic sex and no cussing.”
Maybe, but he also says “The “Sins of the Fathers… is obviously my homage to Ross Macdonald; I hope the rest is original enough to create an enjoyable plot for my readers.”
Pack your bags…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of California’s Medical School at Davis, Jerold Last is a two-time winner of The Indie Book of the Day Award. He and his wife Elaine lived previously in Salta, Argentina and Montevideo, Uruguay, and currently live in Northern California, where she breeds prize-winning German Shorthaired Pointer dogs and provides technical advice for and edits his novels.
NOVELS
- The Ambivalent Corpse (2011) | Kindle it!
- The Surreal Killer (2011)
- The Matador Murders (2012)
- The Deadly Dog Show (2013)
- The Origin of Murder (2014)
- Unbearably Deadly (2014)
- Hunter Down (2015)
- Rum, Cigars and Corpses (2016)
- Abra Cadaver (2017) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
- Roger and the Cancelled Czech (2018) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
- Dangerous Dogs and Dexterous Dogs (2019) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
- A Train to Nowhere (2020) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
- Tahoe Trauma (2021) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
- Bloody Delta Dawn (2023) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
- Peril in Paradise (2023) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
- A Close Shave with Occam’s Razor (2024) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
- Tapas and Treachery (2025) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
SHORT STORIES & NOVELLAS
- “The Empanada Affair” (2011; digital; 2013, Five Quickies for Roger and Suzanne)
- “Someone Did It to the Butler” (2012; 2013, Five Quickies for Roger and Suzanne)
- “The Body in the Parking Structure” (2012, digital) | Kindle it!
- The Body in the Bed (2012, digital)
- “The Dog With No Name” (2012, Five Quickies for Roger and Suzanne)
- “The Haunted Gymnasium” (2012, Five Quickies for Roger and Suzanne)
- “The Body in the Alpaca Pasture” (2015, digital)
- “The Bodies by the Beltway” (2017, digital) | Kindle it!
COLLECTIONS
- Five Quickies for Roger and Suzanne (2013) | Kindle it!
- Science Can Be Murder (2015) | Kindle it!
Collects “The Ambivalent Corpse,” “The Body in the Parking Structure” and The Origin of Murder.
FURTHER INVESTIGATIONS
- Married to It!
Hitched! Married Eyes and Their Spouses…
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
