The Innocents

Karl Myers is a World War II Veteran who, having lost his family prior to the War, has settled into his job as small town police chief in 1955. His duties dramatically change when a young boy is brutally murdered. The victim’s sister and his best friend are the only witnesses, but what the sister has witnessed has left her catatonic and the friend provides little in the way of helpful information. While pursuing one dead end after another, Myers finds himself in the sights of the mother of the witness, a bright, sensitive and beautiful woman married to an ex-Marine who runs her life as though she were a buck private. The murder and the mother's search for an escape from her marriage are resolved but in a way that Myers never expected. “The Innocents” explores a seldom acknowledged dark side of the “Greatest Generation,” including a peak at the desperate lives of too many American homemakers in the Fifties and their battered and abused sons. This book is the first in a series of Karl Myers mysteries.