Troop 1204

Troop 1204
Author: Craig Estes
Publisher: Trafford Publishing
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2002
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1553693965

From a new author comes a mystery that encompasses four decades of brutal murder and betrayal among a group of neighborhood friends who rise to prominence, wealth and fame, but cannot escape the choice each made about his role in this nation's longest and least understood military campaign. TROOP 1204 On a hot summer California night in 1958, someone brutally slit the throat of a Boy Scout and carved a gruesome murder signature across the twelve year old's forehead. Now, 40 years after that horrific overnight campout, another member of Troop 1204 turns up dead in Arizona with the same latticework pattern of forehead carvings, and the police look to the surviving scouts for their killer. The latest victim, an international film idol, brings worldwide attention to the 1204 troop roster, which includes a policeman, a TV news anchor, a university professor and a doctor, as well as two lawyers and a United States Congressman. The authorities are especially interested in Joshua Hilliard, the only scout known to be in Arizona at the time of the second killing. Hilliard, a Washington, D.C. urban design architect and decorated Vietnam War veteran, sets out to solve the crimes and clear his name. Teaming up with his wife, Carla, a high powered D.C. attorney, he retraces his life and the lives of the other ten surviving scouts, working against time to find the killer before he is indicted for the murders of his childhood friends, the two amateur sleuths confront their past as they fight for their future. In the course of their investigation, they discover how the war has effected their friends' lives and their own feelings toward each other since Joshua's return from Vietnam. As new murders occur and old ones come to light, Josh wages a battle with long dormant memories of his tour in country while Carla comes face to face with her husband's old combat adrenaline rush and her own sexual reawakening as well.

Fielder's Choice

Fielder's Choice
Author: Craig Estes
Publisher: Trafford Publishing
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2004-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1412003229

W.D. Fielder's prim Virginia bred mother certainly wasn't looking for her seventeen-year-old's disgusting pinup magazines. But when she found them, while cleaning up his room, that rainy spring afternoon in 1989, she just kind of lost it. She had never raised a hand to either of the twins, William David or Wallace Daniel, but she did that day and paid for her lose of control with her life. Over the next decade, the late Edna Fielder's miscalculation fostered a flood of missing persons reports being lodged with the Barnwell County, Maryland Sheriff's department, but none of the almost three dozen missing women were ever found. The authorities, chagrined at being unable to solve even a single one of the cases, took the position that the girls had most likely just run away to see the world in Washington, D.C. or Baltimore or maybe even New York City. Then the newspaper publisher's daughter disappears while investigating the controversial Forest Vista land development project, located on one of the Fielder family properties, and all hell breaks loose. From the opulent corporate boardrooms of Washington, D.C. to the drug infested Baltimore slums and the rich rural farmlands in between, follow Jillian Hargrove and Architect Romulus Reynolds as they search for Reporter Chelsa Wellington and the other missing girls, even as the WD's track their every move. Initially reluctant to accede to his client's request to get involved in the search for the missing reporter, Reynolds is even more reticent in agreeing to let Jillian help. It's not just that she represents a group of neighbors, who want to stop his client's project. What really makes him uncomfortable is the possibility that she has become the kidnapper's next target. As their investigation reveals the magnitude of the twins' depravity, Rom's reservations are complicated by the fact that he has fallen passionately in love with Jillian. As their relationship deepens and the investigation accelerates, so do his fears that he will soon be coming face to face with the prospect of Jillian's death at the hands of the twins.