The Man Who Needed Killing — Susan Brassfield Cogan

This novel finished in the top 100 of the 2008 Amazon Breakout Novel Contest and won 1st place in the 2010 OWFI Conference Mystery Division It is 1935 and Joe Bennett is a straight-arrow town sheriff who must investigate the death of a man everyone is happy to be rid of. A wandering minstrel (who in 1935 was called a hobo) has a magical ruby ring and an even more magical harmonica. This story also has lying friends, secretive townspeople, a woman of negotiable virtue and her criminal boyfriend, a beautiful angel in a cold white box and a dead man who really, really deserved it.