A Clean Kill - Paperback

by Ted Wood (Author)

A crime spree ends in murder for Canadian police chief Reid Bennett, "one of the most interesting series whodunit heroes of the decade" (Chicago Sun-Times).

There is no rest tonight for Reid Bennett, police chief of tiny Murphy's Harbor in Canada. Not if he keeps getting phone calls, that is. The first comes in from Amy Wilson. She's been brutally attacked on her arrival home from play rehearsal. The second has Reid breaking up a fight at a bar called Murphy's Arms. But the third call, about a dead body, is when things get complicated. The body belongs to one of the night's bar brawlers, an American tourist now stabbed to death in the road. It seems like there is an obvious murder suspect until another body shows up in the lake.

Are these murders and the attack somehow intertwined? Reid must wade carefully through the evidence and the witnesses, all the while juggling pressure from a hostile city council and unwelcome reporters. Add in the town play, bear baiters, and American evangelicals, and Reid has his hands more than full. Thankfully, he has got his dog Sam by his side.

Author Biography

Ted Wood was born in Shoreham, Sussex, England. Throughout his life, he was a flier, a beat cop, a pin-boy, a soda-jerk, a freight porter, and an advertising hotshot. He also wrote dozens of short stories, hundreds of magazine articles, including two long-running humor columns, television plays, and one musical comedy. He had fourteen books, thirteen of them novels, published in Canada, the United States, Britain, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, and Japan. Wood was the author of the acclaimed Reid Bennett mystery series. As Jack Barnao, he also wrote the John Locke Mysteries: Lockestep, Hammerlocke, and Timelocke.

After being widowed, he married his wife, Mary, in 1975. He was the father of three, stepfather to another three, and granddad to a total of nine, counting steps and one step-step. Wood ran Whitby's Ezra Annes House bed and breakfast in partnership with Mary. He passed away in 2019.