Four Complete Sherry Russell Thrillers: The Revised Editions: Volume 2 of 2: The Woman Detective/Die Detektivin

About the book

About Four Complete Sherry Russell Thrillers: The Revised Editions: Volume 2 of 2: The Woman Detective/Die Detektivin

James K. Rone’s independently published Sherry Russell Thrillers spanned four novels and the years 1963 to 1969, give or take, in the life of a sexy, smart, tough Tennessee belle. Sherry Russell, daughter of a hard-nosed Nashville newspaper editor and a Murfreesboro-born Southern lady. Her life, Sherry declares at one point, is a bouncing between Nashville and its smaller-town, college-town neighbor, Murfreesboro, thirty miles to the southeast, largely at the geographic center of Tennessee. The novels follow Sherry from dropping out of teacher’s college, unsure she could stand kids that much, to being a skilled charge-nurse at prestigious Nashville hospital—blackballed out of nursing through no fault of her own, scapegoated for others’ mistakes—forced to take up a career as a private detective, her first case exposing the infidelity of her police-reporter fiancé. In No Nice Girls, Sherry takes on her first fatal case, the 1965 blackmail of the Queen of Country Music, leading the detective to sin-city Biloxi, Mississippi, playground of both the East Coast Italian Mafia, and home to the Dixie Mafia, a loose-knit band of thugs specializing in murder, graft, and corruption. Sherry's investigation ping-pongs her between the two criminal gangs, and ultimately facing an acid-burning, trussed up in a seedy Biloxi Strip motel. In Klavern Sherry has transitioned to being a suburban, Murfreesboro, housewife—bored by homemaking and under increasing pressure by her husband and family to have a baby. Seeking relief, she takes on the murder investigation of her “help’s” sharecropper brother in Alabama, the man lynched, with three others, after being arrested for the killing of a white farmer. Sherry’s fresh feminine perspective quickly clears Montie Collins of the first murder—robbing the Ku Klux Klan of its motivation for the “Lavonia Massacre," and threatening the greater machinations of a megalomaniacal Imperial Wizard. The FBI in the end, desperately needing Sherry to go undercover at a big Klan rally, and stop a race war to end all race wars. In 1968, newly divorced Sherry accepts as a new client a likely gubernatorial candidate, and acquaintance of her father's, investigating the motor-vehicle crash death of his World War II B-17 squadron mate, Ralph Butterworth. In The Woman Detective Sherry’s pursuit of conspiracy theorist Butterworth’s fate leads her to a nest of Nazism in Huntsville, Alabama’s NASA community in the run-up to the Apollo moon missions, and a vicious encounter with arch-rival Veronika Reinhard—Miss Nazi 1968! Sherry’s Nazi-hunting continues in Die Detektivin (German for “The Woman Detective”), uncovering and infiltrating a Fourth Reich conspiracy in Upstate New York, in the Finger Lakes wine country. With the cryptic help of the Mossad—Israeli intelligence—and the opposition of the ODESSA (the Organization of Former Members of the SS), and their bedfellows, the United States Central Intelligence Agency.

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