Woods Cop Mysteries Books

In a brilliant debut to a thrilling series, Grady Service gets news that his nemesis, the head of an incestuous clan of poachers, is to be released from prison. But something even more sinister is afoot in the Mosquito Wilderness. Service must call upon his every reserve to track, stalk, and capture the “ice hunter.” For more on Joseph Heywood and the Woods Cop Mysteries, visit the author's website.

A string of protests by animal-rights activists appear to have culminated in a double murder at a wolf lab, which releases into the wild a rare animal: a blue wolf. To the Ojibwa a blue wolf means luck; but if captured or killed, Armageddon. Grady Service is in a race against time as an elusive poachers' ring chooses its final target: the blue wolf. For more on Joseph Heywood and the Woods Cop Mysteries, visit www.josephheywood.com

Strange things are happening to the black bears of the Upper Peninsula. Grady Service is stumped until a Korean-born professor is murdered by cyanide-laced figs that contain two freeze-dried bear gall bladders. Sexy and suspenseful, Chasing a Blond Moon also introduces a new twist in Grady's personal life: he meets a son he never knew he had. For more on Joseph Heywood and the Woods Cop Mysteries, visit the author's website.

We go back in time twenty-five years to meet Service as a young conservation officer. Still fresh from Vietnam, but on home turf, Service has been tapped for an unusual assignment that threatens to be his last. Full of outrageous characters and the verisimilitude the series is known for, Running Dark is a wild and riveting ride. For more on Joseph Heywood and the Woods Cop Mysteries, visit the author's website.

A serial killer is knocking off America's best conservation officers―and Service learns he is next on the list. The FBI brings him on the case, but Service is also out for blood. The killer has murdered his girlfriend, Maridly Nantz, and his son, Walter. Service must navigate the terrain of his own grief as well as the killer's twisted mind. For more on Joseph Heywood and the Woods Cop Mysteries, visit the author's website.

In the sixth title in the successful Woods Cop Mystery series, another suspenseful who-done-it finds Grady Service with an unexpectedly complex, truly rotten, and important case on his hands. This time tainted eggs are showing up in caviar and Service must expose a ring of corruption in state government and perhaps within his own beloved DNR, one that could lead him all the way to the top. Making enemies at every level of the state, Service rousts out the people on the take. Can he get to the source of the contaminated eggs and prove it? Pitting corporate greed against the health of the general public isn't something Service takes lightly. He doesn't rest until there has been full exposure in a case that takes him from the wilds of the Upper Peninsula to the jungles of the state capital, into the maw of the Ukrainian mafia in New York City and onto distant beaches of Central America. For more on Joseph Heywood and the Woods Cop Mysteries, visit the author's website, www.josephheywood.com .

Grady Service, Detective for Michican Upper Peninsula's DNR, is running hot and cold--Chasing an eco-terrorist trained in the most advanced and explosive guerrilla tactics AND tackling an eighty-year-old cold case involving racism, gold, and murder.

California's folklore is kept alive in these expert retellings by master storyteller S. E. Scholosser, and in artist Paul Hoffman's evocative illustrations.

Every fall in northern Michigan brings a spate of dogman sightings. A radio DJ’s invention, the dogman was created as an attention-getting joke. But millions of Michiganders believe in angels and vampires, werewolves, Bigfoot . . . and the dogman. Late summer, the horribly mutilated bodies of two Native American girls are found in a tent in a remote campground in the Huron Mountains. Grady Service, who wants nothing more than to return to patrolling his beloved Mosquito Wilderness, is called into the case. Strange animal tracks are found, mayhem ensues, a bloody trail of victims begins to accumulate, and the governor, in a political panic, and on her way out of office, orders Grady to hunt down and eliminate the killer--on her office’s dime. Grady Service does not believe in Easter bunnies, Santa Claus, or dogmen, and the "monster" hunt that unfolds in Killing a Cold One builds to a violent finish in some of the Upper Peninsula’s harshest and deadliest terrain. Joseph Heywood's legendary woods cop is called upon to use all of his investigative skills to sort fantasy from reality in order to do what the governor wants.

The 10th installment of the beloved Woods Cop Mystery series! The traditional firearm deer season in Michigan lasts two weeks, a time in which the most hunters are afield during the year and the time when most things happen. Game wardens cannot count on having any life but work during this period, and in this case Grady Service, who takes longtime violator and archrival Limpy Allerdyce on as his partner for deer season runs into the most bizarre string of big cases involving deer that he has ever encountered. Buckular Dystrophy is the term coined by Conservation Officers to describe the condition whereby people cannot help killing deer, not for sport or food, but for other reasons – an addiction of sorts, and unlike other addictions, one not medically organized, but just as real.

In the eleventh Woods Cop Mystery, Conservation Officer Grady Service is on unpaid suspension until spring, but—stubborn as ever—continues to patrol the Mosquito Wilderness, along with his complicated past. Service is off-duty through July 4 following a season in which Service and his unofficial partner (lifelong poacher Limpy Allerdyce) cleaned up on deer-law violators and poachers, closing more big cases in two weeks than most officers solve in their careers. His reward? He is summoned to Lansing, told he is on unpaid suspension, his badge, firearms, and truck taken. The rationale for the action is fuzzy, a questioning of his using a lifelong lawbreaker as partner. For the first time, Service has no duties and feels like he has been beached unfairly. But voluntarily on patrol, he begins to sense political shenanigans –an old foe lurking somewhere in the shadows. He could retire, but decides to fight, and enlists help from Allerdyce and fellow game warden and Vietnam Veteran Luticious Treebone. Clues accumulate: It seems someone wants to illegally commercialize the Mosquito. Grady realizes if he doesn’t stop it, the wilderness will be destroyed. The tight story unfolds like a poker game, with one side bluffing and raising, while the other side keeps calling and keeping the game on until there is a final showdown.

Just when longtime Michigan conservation officer Grady Service is certain that he’s seen it all, he learns once again that he hasn’t. After so many decades protecting his state’s natural resources, here he still is, undercover yet again—not in a case he's developed, but dumped into a case by the Feds (with his governor’s approval). And as time passes, he can’t figure out if what he’s buried in is truly a religious nationalist militia group set on overturning the U.S. Constitution, or one man’s cash cow, a sort of half-ass redneck Ponzi aimed solely at fattening a single bank account. The newest Woods Cop Mystery, #12 in the legendary series, is another soaring brainchild of Joseph Heywood, author of the Woods Cop and Lute Bapcat Mysteries, both of which explore a way of life lived by Michigan game wardens over many different decades, from the Bapcat mysteries of the early 1900s to Grady Service and compatriots in contemporary times.