Eleven Days

By Donald Harstad

Eleven Days is a wry and gripping police thriller. Written by a former deputy sheriff on his vacation, the story covers the solving of a horrific satanic cult murder in farmland Iowa in just – eleven days.

The first Deputy Sheriff Carl Houseman knows of the murder case that will take over his life for the next eleven days is when a call comes into his Nation County police department from an unidentified source, believed female, possibly under fifty. No call back number. “Help us,” she says, “they’re killing everybody!” Spread over two remote farms amidst the cornfields of Iowa, Carl eventually finds four bodies – one man with his hand chopped off – but no sign of the female caller. Another body is on his back, legs secured to the bed wtih black cord. He’s been castrated and black wax poured into into eyes. His tongue is missing and there’s a substance around his mouth which looks like dried super glue. Female FBI Special Agent Hester Gorse comments: “You don’t suppose they tried to glue his tongue back on, do you?” Along with Hester, a dyslexic investigator called Theo, a sassy radio dispatcher called Sally, his long-suffering schoolteacher wife and numerous Iowa cops who may never have encountered a murder in their lives, Carl somehow manages to collar the perpetrator of these horrific murders in just Eleven Days.

Format: Paperback (A Format)
Release Date: 06 May 1999
Pages: 352
ISBN: 978-1-85702-870-6
Don Harstad worked in a mailroom at Columbia TV following service in Vietnam and then in 1974 became a patrol officer, then an investigator, and later Deputy Sheriff of Clayton County, Iowa. He retired in 1996 and now writes from his experience.

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