John Fulghum Mysteries, Vol. II

The style of E. W. Farnsworth’s stories reminds one of Chandler or Elroy on amphetamines. John “Jack” Fulghum, Private Investigator, bachelor, former war hero and inveterate outsider, solves grisly homicide cases that stump the overworked police forces of Boston and other cities. To solve these cases, he crosses jurisdictional boundaries in the US and abroad and teams with close, like-minded friends Nigel Pounce of Boston Homicide and Kenneth Mander, of the Central Intelligence Agency. These stories are not for the faint of heart. In “Hammer” the hard-boiled detective solves the case of the bloodthirsty murder and chainsaw dismemberment of two men and a woman. In “Crop Duster” he solves the case of the execution style murders of two boys who witnessed an unacknowledged black operation in the Deep South. In three linked stories, Fulghum works for a gypsy family and becomes involved in a gypsy war. Two linked “Hacker” stories tell how Fulghum works unofficially with the CIA and NSA to track down a vicious hacker. In “Bloody End of the Line” the detective helps eliminate some of the worst ISIS beheading murderers. Finally three linked “Headshot” stories are about a sniper’s legacy bringing the detective face to face with the killer on Boston Common and a domestic intelligence organization with tentacles that reach to an island off the coast of Venezuela. Farnsworth suggests much more than he tells in stories that sit on the edge of a barely visible, deadly and forbidden territory that twisted systems have created by policy to protect the guilty.