Murder with a dark and bloody past. Storms and flooding in the small town of Hanbury unearth the body of a young Black man shot and buried on the margins of an old plantation. Local cops conclude that the murdered man was passing through and got into an “altercation” with some unknown person. They’d like to close the book, but the local Black community is fed up with crimes against their own being brushed aside as unimportant. The sheriff agrees, reluctantly and under pressure, to accept Gil Tillier as an outside investigator, and what looks like an isolated incident turns out to have deep roots in the history of the rich southern Alabama farmland. The Series Murder on the Gulf Coast. Gil Tillier, the reluctant homicide detective in Accidents of Life, has retired. He’s too young for that of course, only in his thirties, but he’s inherited just enough money to scrape by in the tiny town of Mars, Alabama, population 832, far away from the mayhem of his meteoric law enforcement career. Tillier wants nothing more to do with murder, but thanks to his former chief—and his own reputation—local cops, victims’ families, and those accused of murder drag him into unsolved crimes and injustices in small towns along the Gulf Coast, from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle. By turns empathic and ascetic, instinctive and intellectual, Tillier sometimes works with local sheriffs or police. Other times, when he has to, he works against them. DEATH AT FALCONFIELDS - DEAD LINE AT SAGO PALMS - THE BODY AT WOOD'S END