Hello! I’m going to be launching a new detective series this year. Gil Tillier, the reluctant homicide detective in Accidents of Life, has “retired”–he’s way 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 cold cases, unsolved crimes, and protests of injustice 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—but sometimes he’s forced to work against them.
DEATH AT FALCONFIELDS
Murder on the Gulf Coast ~ Book 1
Murder with a dark and bloody past. Storms and flooding in the small town of Hanbury unearth the body of an 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 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. Now available from Amazon: DEATH AT FALCONFIELDS.
DEAD LINE AT SAGO PALMS
Murder on the Gulf Coast ~ Book 2
Murder on the wrong side of town. When a wealthy White businessman is shot in front a Black female employee’s house, local cops arrest the woman’s ex-husband. He has an alibi, but he owns the gun used to commit the crime. When he’s arraigned, his supporters in the neighborhood say he’s being railroaded. When he gets out on bail, the victim’s family says the cops are soft on crime. A protest becomes a riot, the cops retaliate with force, and the town splits in two. With outrage and violence threatening on both sides, Gil Tillier investigates, and what looks like a straightforward crime of passion turns out to have a complex history of power, love, and greed.
THE BODY AT WOOD’S END
Murder on the Gulf Coast ~ Book 3
Murder in the middle of nowhere. A farmer finds the body of a woman at the bottom of a well on an old abandoned homestead in the tiny unincorporated town of Wood’s End in southern Mississippi. The victim is identified as 52-year-old Sherri Sokolov, who disappeared from Panama City, Florida, three months earlier—250 miles from where she was found. When a homeless veteran tries to use Sherri’s credit card and pawn her jewelry, he’s accused of the murder. An advocacy group steps up to defend him, and the case finds its way to Gil Tillier. This will be a private investigation, and to find the killer, Tillier will have to work without the assistance or cooperation of the resentful local sheriff.
Coming in 2026:
RUN DOWN ON HEADWIND BAY
Murder on the Gulf Coast ~ Book 4
The beautiful young wife of a wealthy, influential old man is run down by a motorboat while waterskiing, dying on the scene with catastrophic injuries. The old man’s personal assistant was driving the boat that was pulling her. He claims that a “big, black motorboat” ran her down and fled the scene, but his own boat has damage consistent with striking a swimmer. The assistant is charged with murder, and the old man hires Tillier to investigate.
Elizabeth Buhmann 