Poetic Justice
Thomas Reeder
1930s BEACH HAVEN, NEW JERSEY
Nickname: “Queen City”
Size: 2.3 square miles
Population: Roughly 700...and shrinking
What begins with a bizarre murder – a cross-dressing local’s body found in his house, mutilated and decomposing, with a cryptic bible passage scrawled in blood on the refrigerator – becomes one man’s hunt for the truth in a seemingly bucolic, New Jersey shore town’s hidden maze of lies, hatred, lust and death.
In their own, shoddy way, the police had just put to bed – even if it wasn't properly solved – the Schweickert case when a new scandal rocked the town: A series of disappearances of women, tied together with a common thread – each of them was an amateur poetess published in the local newspaper. The patrons of Lewis Porter’s bar – and the police – had their own snide, simplistic theories as to why wives would run off. When a friend of Porter’s wife disappears, she asks him to look into it. What Porter finds looking back is a mystery that leads him through a labyrinth of wrong turns and dead ends – from the beaches to the Pinelands – and to deadlier, darker answers, about the town, its people...and himself.
In Thomas Reeder’s expert hands, strand after strand of this intricately woven mystery comes together to create Poetic Justice: a tapestry of sin and suspense that will envelop and keep you breathlessly rapt from beginning to end.