Clothes Make the Man and Other Crimes collects four short short stories: In “The Sun Dress,” a dress, an affair, and a gun lead to a surprising and explosive confrontation. Next up, Officer Peggy Roberts makes a traffic stop and hopes to catch a killer in “Clothes Make the Man.” The flash-fiction piece “Details, Details” illuminates the research behind David’s perfect plan to kill his boss. Finally, “First Impression” is a night on the town with a cold-blooded assassin who has made going unnoticed the cornerstone of his profession.
“Clothes Make the Man” was originally published in the print anthology Writes of Spring from the fabulous Once Upon a Crime mystery bookstore. The other three stories are exclusive to this e-book. The excerpt below is the opening of the title story.
The buttons above are for my self-published collection; below is one for the Writes of Spring anthology.
Clothes Make the Man
To catch a killer on a traffic stop . . . that would be cool. Officer Peggy Roberts had the thought as a black car heading south ran a stop light on Hamline Avenue. She’d just listened to the dispatcher send a squad to a homicide a few miles north of the intersection. She accelerated, taking a right off Larpenteur, to follow the car. Probably just a coincidence, she thought. This isn’t Law & Order: Falcon Heights, after all. But when Roberts checked in with dispatch, she learned that right after the 911 caller found the half-dressed body of his neighbor lying in a puddle of blood, stabbed repeatedly, he’d spotted a dark car leaving the scene. Still, that didn’t narrow things down much. How many dark cars were there in a five-mile radius around the murder? And it seemed to Roberts that at any intersection at least one car rolled through a red every few cyclings of the lights. When had red lights become just a suggestion? The black car, a late-model Lexus, was just a block ahead of her, and Roberts quickly caught up. The driver appeared to be alone. . . .
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