The Last Casualty
(2026)(The second book in the Roscoe Benteen Mystery series)
A novel by Blair Howard
The dead man on the Cravens House lawn is posed like a Civil War casualty.
Hamilton County Sheriff's Lieutenant Roscoe Benteen recognizes the staging for what it is. He also recognizes the body.
Colonel Hayden Marsh called him twice in the three weeks before he died. Benteen never called back.
Now four bodies have turned up inside the national military park, each one arranged to recreate a battlefield photograph from 1863. The press is chasing a history-obsessed lunatic through the fog on Lookout Mountain.
Benteen knows better. The poses are a screen. The murders were never about the war.
They're about land. Five holdouts. One corridor worth a fortune. And a killer who is almost finished.
The final name on his list belongs to a twenty-six-year-old woman who has no idea her father's church property is the last piece of the map. She's the only holdout still breathing, and the man hunting her is methodical, local, and nearly done.
Benteen has a case built from financial records, a witness ready to flip, and a debt to a dead man he can never repay. What he doesn't have is time.
The Last Casualty is the second novel in the Roscoe Benteen Mysteries, a hard-edged Southern crime series set in the hills and battlefields of southeast Tennessee. For readers who like their detectives quiet, their procedure sharp, and their killers hiding in plain sight.
Genre: Mystery
Hamilton County Sheriff's Lieutenant Roscoe Benteen recognizes the staging for what it is. He also recognizes the body.
Colonel Hayden Marsh called him twice in the three weeks before he died. Benteen never called back.
Now four bodies have turned up inside the national military park, each one arranged to recreate a battlefield photograph from 1863. The press is chasing a history-obsessed lunatic through the fog on Lookout Mountain.
Benteen knows better. The poses are a screen. The murders were never about the war.
They're about land. Five holdouts. One corridor worth a fortune. And a killer who is almost finished.
The final name on his list belongs to a twenty-six-year-old woman who has no idea her father's church property is the last piece of the map. She's the only holdout still breathing, and the man hunting her is methodical, local, and nearly done.
Benteen has a case built from financial records, a witness ready to flip, and a debt to a dead man he can never repay. What he doesn't have is time.
The Last Casualty is the second novel in the Roscoe Benteen Mysteries, a hard-edged Southern crime series set in the hills and battlefields of southeast Tennessee. For readers who like their detectives quiet, their procedure sharp, and their killers hiding in plain sight.
Genre: Mystery