Book description
Alafair Tucker is a strong woman, the core of family life on a farm in
Oklahoma where the back-breaking work and daily logistics of caring for
her husband Shaw, their nine children, and being neighborly requires
hard muscle and a clear head. She's also a woman of strong opinions, and
it is her opinion that her neighbor, Harley Day, is a drunkard and a
reprobate. So, when Harley's body is discovered frozen in a snowdrift
one January day in 1912, she isn't surprised that his long-suffering
family isn't, if not actually celebrating, much grieving. When Alafair
helps Harley's wife prepare the body for burial, she discovers that
Harley's demise was anything but natural-there is a bullet lodged behind
his ear. Alafair is concerned when she hears that Harley's son, John
Lee, is the prime suspect in his father's murder, for Alafair's
seventeen-year-old daughter Phoebe is in love with the boy. At first,
Alafair's only fear is that Phoebe is in for a broken heart, but as she
begins to unravel the events that led to Harley's death, she discovers
that Phoebe might be more than just John Lee's sweetheart: she may be
his accomplice in murder. This debut novel is a remarkably tactile
historical mystery. It's set in Oklahoma farm country in 1912. Harley
Day, a generally disliked fellow, has been found dead in a snow bank.
Some people think old Harley drank himself to death. Alafair Tucker
certainly believes that, and when Harley's son, John Lee, is accused of
murdering him, she flat-out doesn't buy it. But then her own daughter,
whose interest in young John Lee is far from casual, is also implicated.
Is this a tragic misunderstanding, or is Alafair's daughter involved in
a murder conspiracy? Alafair Tucker, an aggressive and practical woman,
makes a very sympathetic protagonist, and the author's depiction of time
and place is so vivid that readers will swear they are smelling the
brisk Oklahoma air and feeling the dirt under their feet. A lot of
writers of historical mysteries tell us about the places their stories
are set in; Casey actually takes us there. Donis Casey was born and
raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A third generation Oklahoman, she and her
siblings grew up among their aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents and
great-grandparents on farms and in small towns, where they learned the
love of family and independent spirit that characterizes the population
of that pioneering state. Donis graduated from the University of Tulsa
with a degree in English, and earned a Master's degree in Library
Science from Oklahoma University. After teaching school for a short
time, she enjoyed a career as an academic librarian, working for many
years at the University of Oklahoma and at Arizona State University in
Tempe, Arizona. Donis left academia in 1988 to start a Scottish import
gift shop in downtown Tempe. After more than a decade as an
entrepreneur, she decided to devote herself full-time to writing. The
Old Buzzard Had It Coming is her first book. The Oklahoma Writers'
Federation awarded The Old Buzzard first place in it's annual writing
contest as the best unpublished mystery of 2004. For the past twenty
years, Donis has lived in Tempe, Arizona, with her husband.
