This image is the cover for the book Accustomed to the Dark, The Joshua Croft Mysteries

Accustomed to the Dark, The Joshua Croft Mysteries

The “compelling” conclusion of the Southwestern mystery series culminates in a showdown between the Santa Fe PI and the convict who shot the woman he loves (Booklist).

Rita Mondragon is lying comatose and near death in a Santa Fe hospital, and her normally even-tempered partner and paramour, private detective Joshua Croft, is on a razor’s edge. This is the second time Rita’s been shot by Ernie Martinez—the first was years ago when he killed her husband and put Rita in a wheelchair—and now the recently escaped convict is on the run with his equally twisted cellmate Luiz Lucero.

Despite a massive police manhunt, and warnings from the FBI and the DEA to back off, Croft sets out to capture the killers himself. As the crazed convicts leave a trail of murder and destruction behind them—from New Mexico to Las Vegas to Denver and across Kansas and Texas—one by one, their pursuers drop by the wayside. Suddenly a strange twist of fate has left only one man hunter remaining—Joshua Croft—in a breathtaking kill-or-be-killed climax in the Florida Everglades.

Walter Satterthwait

Walter Satterthwait (b. 1946) is an author of mysteries and historical fiction. A fan of mystery novels from a young age, he spent high school immersed in the works of Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane. While working as a bartender in New York in the late 1970s, he wrote his first book: an adventure novel, Cocaine Blues (1979), about a drug dealer on the run from a pair of killers. After his second thriller, The Aegean Affair (1982), Satterthwait created his best-known character, Santa Fe private detective Joshua Croft. Beginning with Wall of Glass (1988), Satterthwait wrote five Croft novels, concluding the series with 1996’s Accustomed to the Dark. In between Croft books, he wrote mysteries starring historical figures, including Miss Lizzie (1989), a novel about Lizzie Borden, and Wilde West (1991), a western mystery starring Oscar Wilde. His most recent novel is Dead Horse (2007), an account of the mysterious death of Depression-era pulp writer Raoul Whitfield.

Open Road Integrated Media