The Old Buzzard Had It Coming (Ulverscroft Large Print) - Hardcover

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.

A third generation Oklahoman, Donis Casey and her siblings grew up among their aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents and great grandparents on farms and in small towns. There they learned the love of family and independent spirit that characterizes the population of that pioneering state. Donis graduated from the University of Tulsa with a degree in English, and earned a Master's degree in Library Science from Oklahoma University. After teaching school for a short time, she enjoyed a career as an academic librarian, working for many years at the University of Oklahoma and at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. The Old Buzzard Had It Coming, her first book, was named the best unpublished mystery of 2004 by The Oklahoma Writers'Federation For the past twenty years, Donis and her husband have lived in Tempe, Arizona.