Flashback

Chief Reid Bennett and his “super-sleuth” dog tackle the crimes of Murphy’s Harbor in this “fairly sturdy, small-town tale, with quiet appeal” (Kirkus Reviews).

In tiny Murphy’s Harbour, where Reid Bennett serves as the one‑man police force, questions and dead bodies tend to pile up all at once. The morning starts with Reid chasing off a gang of threatening teens with a baseball bat. Minutes later, Reid learns that a bank robber might be headed his way looking for vengeance. But the day does not really start rolling until Reid finds a dead woman in the trunk of a waterlogged car. What follows is a fast‑paced thriller involving rich lawyers, a questionable movie producer, and quite a few shifting identities. Everyone seems to be circling everyone else in a complicated orbit of sex and money. Can all these events be tied together?

Ted Wood was born in Shoreham, Sussex, England. Throughout his life, he was a flier, a beat cop, a pin-boy, a soda-jerk, a freight porter, and an advertising hotshot. He also wrote dozens of short stories, hundreds of magazine articles, including two long-running humor columns, television plays, and one musical comedy. He had fourteen books, thirteen of them novels, published in Canada, the United States, Britain, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, and Japan. Wood was the author of the acclaimed Reid Bennett mystery series. As Jack Barnao, he also wrote the John Locke Mysteries: Lockestep, Hammerlocke, and Timelocke.
 
After being widowed, he married his wife, Mary, in 1975. He was the father of three, stepfather to another three, and granddad to a total of nine, counting steps and one step-step. Wood ran Whitby’s Ezra Annes House bed and breakfast in partnership with Mary. He passed away in 2019.