Search results for ""Author Joseph Heywood""

Woods Cop mystery author Joseph Heywood takes readers to an era when people had to be as hard as the lives they lived. Meet Lute Bapcat, orphan, loner, former cowboy, Rough Rider, beaver trapper, a man who in 1913, with the enthusiastic recommendation by Theodore Roosevelt, himself, becomes one of the Michigan's first civil service game wardens. His territory: The Keweenaw Peninsula, the state's industrial center. Featuring a stunning array of characters, fascinating historical detail, and Heywood's trademark writing about life and work in Michigan's wild, Red Jacket asks Lute to confront an explosive, bloody labor strike; a siege-like sabotage, including a sudden rash of decapitated, spoiled deer; poisoned trout streams and well water; and unusual deforestation—all apparently designed by mine owners to deny nature's bounty to the strikers, and thereby to break the union. The strike's violence culminates in the Italian Hall disaster, during which a man allegedly yells fire in a small building with several hundred people inside. In the panic, 73 people are crushed or die of suffocation, the majority of them the children and wives of striking miners at the hall for a Christmas party. Even with good people dying, the Michigan governor refuses to take sides. Should Lute Bapcat?

Read more less

Woods Cop mystery author Joseph Heywood takes readers to an era when people had to be as hard as the lives they lived. Meet Lute Bapcat, orphan, loner, former cowboy, Rough Rider, beaver trapper, a man who in 1913, with the enthusiastic recommendation by Theodore Roosevelt, himself, becomes one of the Michigan's first civil service game wardens. His territory: The Keweenaw Peninsula, the state's industrial center. Featuring a stunning array of characters, fascinating historical detail, and Heywood's trademark writing about life and work in Michigan's wild, Red Jacket asks Lute to confront an explosive, bloody labor strike; a siege-like sabotage, including a sudden rash of decapitated, spoiled deer; poisoned trout streams and well water; and unusual deforestation-all apparently designed by mine owners to deny nature's bounty to the strikers, and thereby to break the union. The strike's violence culminates in the Italian Hall disaster, during which a man allegedly yells fire in a small building with several hundred people inside. In the panic, 73 people are crushed or die of suffocation, the majority of them the children and wives of striking miners at the hall for a Christmas party. Even with good people dying, the Michigan governor refuses to take sides. Should Lute Bapcat?

Read more less

As 50th anniversaries of the events of the Vietnam War happen for the next 10 years, this Lyons Press reissue of Taxi Dancer gives Joseph Heywood fans and others the opportunity to read his fictional account of that conflict’s air war through the eyes of Captain Barney South. In this novel, the first of Heywood's career, we meet the first Flying Ace of the Vietnam War, Captain Barney South, who has flown ninety hazardous missions. He has already used up more than his fair share of luck. With ten more missions to go, he doesn't need the brand of flak he's been getting from the brass, who have more use for dead heroes than live troublemakers. And now, they're offering him a long shot—the most important mission of the war, they say—although Barney is convinced he's being set up. Taxi Dancer is a novel based on an elite corps of jet pilots who flew controversial and highly dangerous bombing raids over North Vietnam. When it was first published, it's front cover carried the following line: “Nam. The Air War. The First Novel to Tell the Story.” Author Joseph Heywood himself is a veteran of the Vietnam air war—1965-1970, USAF Instructor Navigator, KC-135 tanker, honorably discharged as captain. Vietnam veteran. Air Medal with 6 Oak Leaf Clusters.

Read more less

Late spring, 2007. Michigan in economic freefall, state budgets being slashed, politics reduced to nastiness, state jobs being erased, and personnel furloughed without pay. Grady Service, detective for the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) in the Upper Peninsula, watches as his colleagues leave the department one by one, leaving him without his old support system. Upon being asked by an old friend to look into unspecified problems his son is facing on the shores of Lake Superior, Service has no idea how complicated his life is about to become. All he knows is that the situation involves something his friend calls "bleeding sand"—and that his new partner, Conservation Officer Donna "Jingo" Sedge, is the oddest young officer he's ever met, both jealous and suspicious of his role in what she views as her case on her turf. Service and Sedge become immersed in a centuries-old mystery they must solve in order to deal with the current and more pressing problem: people willfully looting and tearing up a Native American archaeological site. As past and present intersect, summer lightning ignites a forest fire in northern Luce County, and the blaze quickly covers 20,000 acres. The story moves at breakneck speed as Service, nearing three decades as a Woods Cop, finds that expectations seem to be changing on all fronts, personal and professional, and he is not certain he can live up to them.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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. Once again, Grady Service, the hard-boiled conservation officer of this superb series set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, has a weird case on his hands. Strange things are happening to the black bear population. Grady Service can’t pin the phenomenon on anyone or anything until a Korean-born professor from Michigan Tech is murdered by cyanide-laced figs—and two freeze-dried bear gall bladders are found among the figs. Service is certain that poachers are at work, killing bears to fuel the Asian market for traditional medicines. The animal-parts market is highly organized, and its practitioners are ruthless and dangerous. Grady’s nemesis, Michigan’s governor, has cut budgets so severely that there are not enough conservation officers to cover the state. Service finds himself filling in for colleagues, chasing illusive poachers who leave little evidence, and wrestling with the usual cast of eccentric and entertaining characters. And there is a new twist in Grady’s personal life: he meets a sixteen-year-old son he never knew he had.Sexy, suspenseful, and full of action, perfect dialogue, and unforgettable characters, Chasing a Blond Moon confirms Heywood as one of the finest of his day.

Read more less

Joseph Heywood ratchets up the suspense in yet another WOODS COP MYSTERY!Upper Michigan Conservation Officer Grady Service has a case on his hands that doesn't make sense. A series of protests and bombings by animal rights activists appears to have culminated in a double murder at a wolf lab, which releases into the wild an extraordinarily rare animal: a blue wolf. To the Ojibwa a blue wolf represents good luck, unless it is captured or killed—and then it is an omen of Armageddon. Service suspects that the murders aren't what they seem to be when the FBI takes over the investigation and reaches far beyond its jurisdiction. Meanwhile, an elusive poaching ring sets its sights on wolves. Once again, Service must defend his hallowed Mosquito Wilderness in a race against time when it becomes clear that its final target is the blue wolf. Full of memorable characters and steeped in the lives of woods cops, Blue Wolf in Green Fire is also a masterpiece of suspense. This second book in the Woods Cop series is a fully satisfying journey into the natural world and beyond, into the terrifying extremes of human nature.For more on Joseph Heywood and the Woods Cop Mysteries, visit www.josephheywood.com

Read more less

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.

Read more less

In the sixth and newest 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.

Read more less

The newest Joseph Heywood mystery novel set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula finds Grady Service out to avenge the murder of his girlfriend and his son. Conservation officers in several states are being gruesomely slaughtered and Service, alone and devastated, navigates the mind of a serial killer before he becomes the next victim. Hunting the hunter through Wisconsin and Missouri, this is Heywood’s most suspenseful and psychological thriller, perfect for fans of Thomas Perry, James Lee Burke or Nevada Barr. The fifth book in the series, STRIKE DOG is the perfect introduction to Heywood’s fiction for outdoorsmen and animal lovers as well.Joseph Heywood is the author of several novels, and lives in Portage, Michigan.

Read more less

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.

Read more less