QUO VADIS, DEPUTY?

Home from Vietnam, Sandy Buford is introduced to a new South as he tries to solve the grisly murder of a hip-pocket lender sixty miles inland from Myrtle Beach. Deputy Buford forms an unlikely alliance with a skeletal priest/lawyer who dresses like he’s still prosecuting unbelievers for the Inquisition, then proceeds to confront a second northern invasion, high drama in low-lying Bogside, a deadly ambush in a piney wood, and even a Black Mass at a house of ill-repute. It’s almost more than the country folk can bear.

Award-winning author Paul A. Barra proves once again that mysteries can be literature too as he brings the southland to life as it was a half-century ago. A former reporter for The Horry Independent in Conway and the senior staff writer for the Diocese of Charleston, Barra knows South Carolina.

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“When Deputy Buford investigates the murder of Councilman Emory James, he discovers things he never knew about life in the backwoods of Horry County. Satanists! Fornicators! Papists! But were any of them responsible for the death of Emory James? In Quo Vadis, Deputy?, Paul A. Barra takes the reader on a ride along into the backwoods of South Carolina in 1969, searching for a simple answer…, but finding instead something beyond his, and perhaps our understanding. Highly recommended!”

~ Jeff Markowitz, author of The Other

“As it should in a well-crafted mystery, author Paul Barra takes the reader down a number of blind alleys and introduces us to some very colorful (and questionable) characters, until the mystery is finally solved. … generously seasoned with the argot, customs, mannerisms and zeitgeist of the deep south in the late 1960s. This one is a winner.”

~ Gregory Stout, author of the award-winning Jackson Gamble Series