The Old Buzzard Had It Coming: An Alafair Tucker Mystery - Hardcover

A violent confrontation between Harley Day, an abusive drunk much despised by his family and neighbors, and his nineteen-year-old son, John, and John's girlfriend, Phoebe Tucker, leads to John and Phoebe becoming the prime suspects in Harley's murder.

Alafair Tucker is a strong woman, the core of family life on a farm in Oklahoma where the backbreaking work and daily logistics of caring for her husband Shaw, their nine children, and being neighborly requires hard muscle and a clear head. She's also a woman of strong opinions, and it is her opinion that her neighbor, Harley Day, is a drunkard and a reprobate. So, when Harley's body is discovered frozen in a snowdrift one January day in 1912, she isn't surprised that his longsuffering family isn't, if not actually celebrating, much grieving. When Alafair helps Harley's wife prepare the body for burial, she discovers that Harley's demise was anything but natural - there is a bullet lodged behind his ear. Alafair is concerned when she hears that Harley's son, John Lee, is the prime suspect in his father's murder, for Alafair's seventeen-year-old daughter Phoebe is in love with the boy. At first, Alafair's only fear is that Phoebe is in for a broken heart, but as she begins to unravel the events that led to Harley's death, she discovers that Phoebe might be more than just John Lee's sweetheart: she may be his accomplice in murder.