A Cold Mind (Stuart Haydon Series, #1)

A Cold Mind is set in Houston in the early 1980s when the city was known as the homicide capital of the nation. It was a period of boom years for the city's exploding growth and the head-spinning homicide rate was a reflection of those chaotic years.

This is the first novel in a quintet of books featuring Stuart Haydon, a homicide detective like no other. Independently wealthy, and faithfully married to an architect he adores, he spends more time alone in his library than in after-hour bars with his fellow detectives. His best friend is his old, wine-slurping collie. Haydon's attraction to his work as a homicide detective is psychological, and it isn't easy to explain. Which is part of the reason why he won't walk away from it.

The novel begins when three of the most beautiful calls girls who circulate in Houston's exclusive haute monde die in bizarre, violent, but seemingly unrelated incidents, Haydon suspects they are separate pieces of the same deadly puzzle. Medical reports on the women indicate the presence of a bizarre, inexplicable element in their bodies, and Haydon launches an investigation that carries him from the shadowy wharves and warehouses of the city's back streets to the exotic world of Hoston's wealthy Brazilian expatriate community?a closed society of extravagant living and well-guarded secrets.

Auteur

I'm a native Texan, and I spent my early years a few miles from the Mexican border in Starr County. Eventually my family moved to West Texas where I grew up in the oil fields and ranches of the Colorado River valley northwest of San Angelo. After graduating from North Texas State University and spending a year in graduate school (focusing on 19th century European literature), I moved to Austin in 1970 where my wife, Joyce, and I still live.

I took an editing job with a small regional press and spent the next decade knocking around in a variety of jobs, including running my own small publishing company for a few years, and editing books in the humanities for the University of Texas Press.

Finally, in 1980, I decided I couldn't wait any longer to try my hand at fiction. I decided to increase my odds of getting published by researching what kinds of fiction had the best chance of finding a publisher. Mystery novels rose to the top of my research results. I don't think I'd ever read a "mystery novel" at that time, but I immediately bought a representative collection of twenty-five popular, famous, and classic mystery novels, including British and European writers. After reading these, and many more, I realized that the "genre" encompassed a startling variety of work, everything from Mickey Spillane to Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Two years later I began my writing career by publishing two mystery novels in the same year. Though I began writing in the mystery/crime genre, the subject matter of the books always leaned into the psychological aspects of human nature. I eventually went on to write fiction in other areas, including thrillers with international settings dealing with national and private intelligence professions.

When I'm not writing, I spend most of my time in my library filled with books predominately in the areas of literature, history, religion and art. My other pleasure is gardening and landscape work where I live in the hilly streets of West Lake Hills (Austin). it's a great pleasure to watch things grow. Joyce and I now sit in the shade of trees that are forty feet tall that we planted when we first moved to this place over thirty-five years ago. That's a good thing.