Dekker Cozy Mystery Books
An elderly woman is found poisoned in the upstairs bedroom of her home whose front door stands 52 steps above the street in an old-fashioned whodunit that blends clues, red herrings, suspects, and humor.
In this clean and cozy mystery a snowstorm hits just before a series of murders, and the police use footprints and tire tracks to try to identify the murderer.
A man is found murdered in the locked library in his home. Surveillance cameras show that no one other than the deceased entered the library. The deceased left a clue for the police, only they cannot figure out what the clue means.
In an upscale apartment building for retired people, where meals are included with the rent, a woman is found poisoned in her apartment with her head bent over in her lunch plate. But the autopsy shows that she was poisoned sometime around breakfast. Was she poisoned before she went down for breakfast, at breakfast seated among the other residents, or after she returned to her apartment?
In the fifth book in this series, Lt. Dekker gets an advance warning that he might be investigating a couple of murders when two people turn up missing after a high school reunion. When those bodies do indeed turn up, the lieutenant and his sergeant sidekick go to work. They start by interviewing everyone who attended that high school reunion. In their favor is the fact that not a lot of people attended the reunion, but it doesn’t help them any when they find out that everyone hated one of the victims, but none of them appear guilty of murder.
In the sixth book in the series, only one thing can convince Lt. Dekker and Sgt. Murdock they need to attend the local art and craft fair. A woman. Actually two women. In the sixth book in the series, Murder at the Art & Craft Fair, the two homicide detectives realize that they would have been attending the event eventually, because before the weekend is over, one person is murdered. It is up to the two detectives to look at all the possible suspects, disgruntled customers and jealous vendors, to see who had both motive and opportunity to end the victim’s life, and then to make sure they have not overlooked anything or anyone.
Two detectives retire and are given a vacation to Gatlinburg, Tennessee as part of their retirement gift. They are traveling as part of a bus tour group, but shortly after they leave home they suspect someone has been murdered. One of the detectives (Cy) forgets he is retired and tries to solve the murder of someone whose body has not yet been discovered, while his friend (Lou) must continually remind him that they are now retired. Cy tries to sneak and solve the murder without a body yet being discovered, while enjoying the first vacation he has taken in over thirty years. Humor and mystery abound.
When an aging coroner says a wealthy author died of natural causes and sees no need to do an autopsy, the county sheriff calls an old friend, retired homicide detective Cy Dekker, to see if the man was murdered. Cy gets a medical examiner friend to do an autopsy and finds that the man was poisoned and the time of death was probably when that author was at a book fair. Cy and his retired partner Lou look at who might have poisoned the man. Suspects include other authors, the author's brother and sister, and his neighbors.
A retired homicide detective is asked by a friend to look into the disappearance of a friend of a friend. About the same time, one person is kidnapped, and others have been murdered after going on a blind date. This whodunit combines humor and clues to the murderer's identity.
When a retired detective encounters a stranger standing outside a restaurant when both of them are on vacation and the stranger finds out what he did before he retired, the detective jokingly tells the stranger that he will come and solve a murder for him if he goes home and finds a body on his front porch.
When someone deposits two bodies in a retired detective's backyard in the middle of the night, he has to go to work again to find out who is responsible and why his backyard was chosen. A lot of hilarious events happen in this whodunit before the detective can return to being retired again.
Humor and mishaps abound as one retired detective calls his former partner to see if he will go with him to cut down their Christmas trees. Reluctantly, his friend agrees, and before the day is over the two of them find a dead body and end up being involved in another homicide investigation.
A retired detective thinks that all he will have to do on Halloween is hand out candy to trick-or-treaters. Everything goes well until all the children in costume come and go, and then the phone calls begin. One of them comes from his former Chief of Police, whom he and his former partner have promised that they will come out of retirement whenever there is a murder in their small town. Not only do they have to go out on a dark night in the pouring down rain, but they have to head out to a remote part of the county where almost no one lives to a place where someone has texted and reported that someone has been murdered. All they have to go on is the location of the cell phone. Before he solves the case, he is confronted with several suspects, none of whom seem to have motives or alibis. This is another whodunit in the Dekker Cozy Mystery series, full of twists and turns and lots of humor.
In this delightful combination of a whodunit mixed with humor, a woman, who has been celebrating her birthday and Valentine's Day, is rushed to the hospital complaining of stomach pains and nausea. She grabs the doctor and tells him she has been poisoned, but before she can tell him any more, she dies. When Lt. Dekker and Sgt. Murdock investigate, they find out that no one liked her, with the possible exception of her husband.
In this fifteenth installment in the series, Cy Dekker is ready to enjoy a nice breakfast at the Blue Moon diner with his good friend Lou Murdock on April Fool’s Day, when a dead body gets in the way. When they find out the man was not murdered, they get to enjoy breakfast together anyway, but a subsequent murder finds the two of them traipsing all over the county questioning a little bit of everyone who knew the man they found dead. The problem is that everyone they question seems to have a good alibi or no motive for murdering the man.
Cy has a new friend, he of the four-legged variety. On the morning of the winter's first snowstorm, Cy's new friend finds a body in the woods. When an autopsy reveals that the man was murdered, Cy and Lou, sometimes accompanied by Cy's new friend, go traipsing through the woods, driving through the most sparsely populated part of the county, and occasionally drive into town, to try to figure out who murdered the man. They soon learn that it is easier to deduce why he was murdered than to figure out who killed him. But eventually, Cy and Lou, with a little help from Cy's new friend, are able to bring the case to a conclusion and retreat to the warmth of their homes.
A murder has been committed. Clues found by constructing a jigsaw puzzle and delving through a large number of library books let Cy and Lou know where they can find the body and who the murderer is. Sort of. The victim can be found in one of about seventy houses and they have only the first name of the murderer. Well, it’s one of eight first names. They knock on doors with hilarious results until they finally find one house that smells worse than the others. Once they find and identify the victim, Sam is able to provide eight last names to go with those first names. Once they question those eight people, they find they have six people who were ready to push each other out of the way to be the first to shoot the victim, one who seems to like the person, and one who seems hardly to know the person. It’s time to use everything they know and each clue and message they are given to deduce which of the eight is the murderer.
Cy and Lou head back to the mountains of Sevier County, Tennessee on vacation with no intention of becoming involved in a murder investigation. But they stumble upon a dead body with two envelopes on it, early in their vacation. One envelope is marked Lt. Dekker. The other says Local Police. Each envelope contains a small amount of information about the identity of the victim and the murderer and a clue as to where they are to go next. They are told they will be going to ten places in all, all in Pigeon Forge. They are led from one Pigeon Forge attraction to another, and at each one, they are to find someone with an envelope containing a clue as to where they are to go next. But the clues are not easy to figure out, and they must seek help among the locals and other vacationers, and that doesn't always go the way Cy hopes it will go. All of it adds up to a hilarious romp and an eventual conclusion.
One murder. Eight suspects. Such is the case when an elderly woman returns home from convalescing after a fall. Six of her neighbors provide a meal for her. Her two grandchildren are there to share it with her. One of those eight ended her life. But which one? And how? It is up to Cy and Lou to figure who did it, how, and why. The why seems easy. The who and how not so much.
Three houses on a country road, each separated from the next by a wooded area. A woman lives in each house. Another wooded section begins after the third house. The woman in the first house claims to be a widow. The woman in the second house says she is married. The woman in the third house admits to being divorced. Across the road from the middle house is a vacant house, but men have been seen at that house. The woman in the middle house claims a man forced his way into her house one night. A little over a week after that, a dead body turns up in the woods. The medical examiner says he has been dead for more than five days and he can't identify him. He died from a blow by a blunt instrument to the back of the head. It is up to Cy and Lou to solve the murder. Most of the men they seek cannot be found.
Cy and Lou both bite the bullet and marry the women they have been dating for years, but after each couple returns from a lengthy honeymoon, both detectives have to head out and solve another murder, this time accompanied by their wives. They encounter a body that almost lands on top of them, sisters they cannot tell apart, suspects that seem guilty, suspects that seem innocent, and a murderer that likes to hide dead bodies. Even a dog, a duck, and additional cops are not enough to bring the case to a hasty conclusion.
A body has been found murdered and left in the swimming pool at the house next door to the house Cy owns in town. A second body is found hundreds of miles away and the two murders seem to be connected. Both houses are owned by home-swappers, and Cy and Lou are persuaded to attend a gathering of home-swappers at a resort in upstate New York. After they arrive at the resort, they are able to cut their suspect list from over one hundred people who have attended to six people. Is the murderer one of them or someone else?
Cy Dekker is sitting on the front porch of his house in the woods when the mail truck makes an infrequent stop at his house. He steps down to talk to the mailman and is handed an envelope addressed to Lt. Cy Dekker. When he opens it, he learns that someone has sent him a note telling him that someone has been murdered. But with each murder before, he receives his information through regular channels. When he does nothing about this, he gets a second note and then a third. Eventually, he is told approximately where he can find the body, so, curious, he and his partner in crime-solving Sgt. Lou Murdock, head out to a different section of the woods with shovels. Lou also brings an umbrella, even though it isn't raining. The two encounter a couple of mishaps, but eventually find a body, and after the body is identified, a list of suspects, most of whom don't seem as despicable as the murdered man.
The Chief calls Cy one morning to let him know that two people have called in to inform the police that there is a dead body lying in the front yard of a house clutching a pink flamingo and he and Lou are to check it out. Once they get to the scene of the crime, Frank, the medical examiner, tells them that the man was murdered, but he wasn't stabbed with the flamingo. They find out the man has no identification on him, and it's their job to find out who he is and who killed him. They begin their investigation by talking to the two people who called it in, and the nosy neighbor across the street who is watching everything they do. But all is not as easy as it seems, including the identity of the dead man.