THE MURDER OF MARABETH WATERS

By Robert Trainor

The midnight murder of a prostitute appears to be an easy case to solve. Inside Marabeth Waters' handbag, Detective Devin Driver finds a threatening note that leads him to Mark Sievers, a teacher at a local community college. Mark supposedly has an alibi since he claims that he spent the night with "Ambrosia," one of the students in his advanced English class. But when Devin talks to Ambrosia, who appears to be drunk, she gives him a bunch of contradictory statements: Maybe she had only been with Mark from 9-11 P.M.; maybe he had stayed until 1 A.M.; maybe she had spent the whole night with him. The problem is that Ambrosia was drinking heavily on the night of the murder and passed out around midnight, but she does seem to remember that...Ambrosia isn't the only one with a drinking problem--ever since Devin's wife died of cancer about six months before Marabeth's murder, Devin has been hitting the sauce to the tune of somewhere between a pint and a fifth of vodka a day. Now forty-four, Devin views himself as a sexual outcast since none of the women he's really attracted to--ages eighteen to twenty five--are showing any interest in him. So all he's left with are older women and all the baggage that they carry around--maybe they're overweight or mean or ugly or have some nasty skeletons in their closets.Devin also happens to work for the most corrupt police department in America. The police chief, otherwise known as Gutter Ball, is a lot more interested in golf and bowling than police work. Discipline at the station is non-existent--to the point where a number of quasi-businesses emanate from the department, including a gambling operation, a carpentry outfit, and a garbage hauling service. It's also no secret that quite a few members of the force are regular users of cocaine.Devin isn't a particularly sharp detective--inwardly, he refers to himself as a right-time and right-place detective. In other words, if he finds a guy standing over the body of his murdered wife with a smoking gun in his hand, Devin knows that he'll be able to figure the whole thing out unless there's some trick twist to the whole thing. However, Marabeth's case appears to be child's play because while Devin is searching Mark's car, he discovers a small bloody fragment of Marabeth's blouse on the floor of the back seat, and when a DNA test confirms that the blood on the fragment is Marabeth's blood, the case is essentially over.Or is it? What follows afterwards is a descent into the mind of a budding serial killer who leaves yet another body behind before he is apprehended. Unfortunately, this serial killer, although he commits a number of truly whopping blunders, is able to remain in obscurity until the very end thanks to the ineptitude and incompetence of the detective investigating the case.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1976883415
• ISBN13: 9781976883415
• Release Date: January 2018
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 155 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.4" x 6.0"