The Oakland Hills Vodou Murder – Book One
The novel is about the murder of Hillary Chatham Dillard, an interracial co-ed at an affluent college campus in California’s Oakland Hills. The body, covered in duck feathers with a majestic mallard duck head protruding from her mouth, was discovered after an annual alumni affair. Was it voodoo…or as pronounced in Caribbean slang…vodou?
The main character, retired Detective Lincoln entered the case after a three-month unsuccessful police investigation. Detective Lincoln, a ‘straight shooter’, never discloses his political and social allegiances. He clings to the high road, but under relentless grinding pressure, will bend the rules back…whereby they may snap! He’s a realist…knowing that true idealism can have you night swimming in the San Francisco Bahy with a concrete ankle brace.
Detective Lincoln deles into the quirks and quagmires of suspects with monetary and social affluence, alleged Mafia connections, local explosive politics, and the necromantic elements of voodoo. Two voodoo practitioners provide conflicting opinions. Which one, if either, speaks the truth? And, there’s the memorable Lenny, the detective’s ‘Helper’ who’s been hospitalized for twenty years due to complete short-term memory loss and follows any command ordered by his superior.
The affluent Dillard family demand to know their daughter’s murderer. They have three remaining children: the eldest, Franklin Jr., is running for high political office; Monique, a design engineer, is stunning and; Radcliffe, the youngest, is a ladies man with neither career ambitions nor job supporting his lavish lifestyle.
The landscape is the beautiful hills of Oakland, California where the affluent and the powerful sit ruling their flat land subjects to the murky crevices and dark corners of the New Orleans’ bayou. It is here, in the Louisiana terrain, where superstition supersedes reality and having a gun may not be enough!