Straw Man von Gerry Boyle

Crime reporter Jack McMorrow is drawn into the darkest tangle of his career when a story about illegal gunrunning between Massachusetts and Maine overlaps with a puff piece about Mennonites. Cultures and tempers clash as Jack tries to keep one step ahead of a looming tide of violence that threatens to take him and his family down forever.

Like many crime novelists, Gerry Boyle began his writing career in newspapers--a place he calls the best training ground ever. After attending Colby College, he knocked around at various jobs, including stints as a roofer, a postman, and a manuscript reader at a big New York publisher. He began his newspaper career in the paper mill town of Rumford, Maine. There was a lot of small-town crime in Rumford and Gerry would later mine his Rumford time for his first novel, Deadline. After a few months he moved on to the Morning Sentinel in Waterville, where editors gave him a thrice weekly column. He wrote about the stuff he saw in police stations, courtrooms, and in the towns and cities of Maine. All the while he was also typing away on a Smith-Corona electric typewriter, writing Deadline which came out in 1993. Straw Man is the 11th installment in the Jack McMorrow Mystery Series.