A Homecoming for Murder — John Armistead

When the cheering dies, murder begins...

In the town of Sheffield, Mississippi, football is next to godliness, and homecoming is the shrine.  But this year, as the homecoming queens--one white, one black--are crowned and families take their usual places in the stands, shocking news is broadcast over the stadium loudspeakers: a popular high school teacher has been found murdered in a cemetery on the edge of town.  

Sheriff Grover Bramlett is a devoted husband, a good cop, and an amateur painter.  Bramlett knows the people, the histories, and the rhythms of Chakchiuma County.  But the murder of a teacher--a man who may have been too friendly with his students--is suddenly making Bramlett a stranger to his familiar world, leading him to the doors of neighbors he once thought he knew.  And when another murder follows the first, Bramlett is suddenly forced to turn his small town inside out.  Because someone is killing in Sheffield to protect a secret--the kind of secret that tears families, lovers, and friends apart, and makes murder right at home.