"The Beast From the Back of the Bus" An eBook Mystery Novel
Available at Smashwords, the Diesel eBook Store, Banes & Noble and Amazon. Ebooks can also be read on a computer with the free Kindle reader app.
What this eBook is about...
Imagine you are an aging over-the-hill country music star on tour in Texas with a murderous ex-con White Supremist on your trail, armed and ready to kill you for past transgressions.
That's the premise of The Beast From the Back of the Bus. It's a mystery/suspense story set in the country music world, but it's not the typical Nashville tale of fans and babes and pampered stars partying and winning awards. It's a gritty, existential story of murder, avarice and retribution.
Country singer Hank Barnett is on tour across Texas in his Silver Eagle bus with his band. Barnett was a big star in his younger days, but now he's in his fifties and the hits have stopped coming, and he's a bitter, vituperative alcoholic who hates himself and everybody else. He doesn't know it, but he is being pursued by a tattooed, bearded ex-con named Wilson Packard who lives in a redoubt in the hill country near Austin and who wants to murder him.
Hank Barnett's childhood in Georgia, when he killed his alcoholic father at eleven and slept with his mother, and his early days in Nashville when he appeared on the Grand Ole Opry with Ernest Tubb and other Opry stars, are told in flashbacks.
Wilson Packard has had a hard life, and it, too, is told in flashbacks. His father died when he was four, and his stepfather, who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, taught him about guns and how to get along in the wild. Packard ran away from home when he was sixteen, and has spent most of his life living with various militant white power supremacist groups.
Suspense mounts as the reader wonders why Packard hates Barnett so much that he trails his bus from Texas to Nashville, searching all the while for an opportunity to gun him down. Packard finally gets his chance, in Nashville at Barnett's house, and both men end up dead and Barnett's live-in girl friend eventually ends up with Barnett's money. But the question is: Who killed whom?
I'm a Nashville musician and I worked the road, the Opry, sessions and TV for over 20 years with a number of country artists, including Stonewall Jackson, Little Jimmy Dickens, Red Sovine and Faron Young. I used to while away the hours on long trips reading mysteries in my bunk on the bus, and then I thought, why not write one of my own? So I did, and this is it.
This is a work of fiction, but the main character, Hank Barnett, is based on Faron Young, who was a character, and the musicians are composites of pickers I've know and worked with over the years. The events contained herein are just figments of my imagination, but the characters and locations are pretty much real, although names have been changed to protect the worried. Available at Smashwords and Amazon.
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