BILL CRIDER – Murder in Four Parts. St. Martin’s, hardcover; First edition: February 2009.

    In his sixteenth adventure, Sheriff Dan Rhodes finds himself getting recruited into the Clearview (Texas) Community Barbershop Chorus. The group can’t be called a “quartet” because it has more than four members.

    But they do specialize in traditional “barbershop” music sung in four-part harmonies. And the chorus quickly finds its numbers diminishing when the chorus director is found beaten to death in his floral shop.

    As usual, Sheriff Rhodes is up to his eyebrows in problems: the murder of florist and chorus director Lloyd Berry; controversy over whether citizens should be permitted to keep chickens in their back yards within Clearview city limits; a turf war between two dumpster-divers; trouble at the local legal-gambling establishment; and (in true Crider spirit) an alligator loose in a drainage ditch.

    The dialogue is often laugh-out-loud funny while unpretentiously realistic. The characters are at once slapstick, while at the same time people that we all know. There’s math professor C.P. Benton, a perpetual braggart and a folksinger who claims skills in anything from the martial arts to computer security, and who has his eye on the female deputy.

    There’s music store owner Max Schwartz, who has branched out into the restaurant trade, but can’t decide whether to spell out “barbecue” or write it as “BBQ.” There’s Tom Fulton, owner of a store specializing in GPS receivers (“Tom’s Tomtoms”) who has a GPS joke for every occasion.

    And of course there is Lawton, the Blacklin County jailer, and Hack Jenson, the county police dispatcher, who carry on like Abbott and Costello.

    Murder in Four Parts leads Sheriff Rhodes through more twists and turns than a country lane with a plot that seems to tie together gambling, embezzlement, geocaching, and waste disposal, and ends with a daring chase that takes Rhodes through a dark and muddy mesquite field and atop a moving train.

    As with all of Crider’s books, this is a delight. By the end you’re likely to be humming harmonies to “Shine on Me” and “The Old Mill Stream.” A melodic masterpiece.