Playing the Devil (A Bridge to Death Mystery)
Cozy Mystery
2nd in Series
Publisher: Kensington (January 28, 2020)
Paperback: 304 pages

Synopsis

Reporter and bridge player Wendy Winchester once again plays ace detective when a country club member is murdered in a hot tub . . .

Now an investigative reporter for the Rosalie Citizen in the Mississippi River port of Rosalie, Wendy still likes to unwind over a game of cards. Following the demise of the Rosalie Bridge Club, she’s started her own group at the Rosalie Country Club. During the first meeting of the Country Club Bridge Players, the dummy has barely been laid down when another dummy gets in a scuffle at the bar across the room. Bridge player Carly Ogle’s husband Brent is at it again.

After the club’s new female golf pro breaks up the fight, Brent storms off to soak in a hot tub. But Carey soon finds the bullying Brent dead in the water, clubbed over the head with the pestle the barkeep uses to crush leaves for mint juleps.

Racist, sexist, homophobic, and an all-around lout, Brent made enough enemies to fill a bridge tournament. So Wendy has to play her cards right to get the story—and stay out of hot water long enough to put the squeeze on the killer . . .

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Guest Post

Today we welcome R. J. Lee to StoreyBook Reviews as he shares with us the role of women in his books and others.  Thanks for joining us today and sharing your thoughts.

Do you like strong female characters? Do you like women represented in positions of power in your fiction?

Then R. J. Lee’s A BRIDGE TO DEATH MYSTERY series is for you. The series debuted last year about this time with GRAND SLAM MURDERS, now in its second printing and enthusiastically reviewed by KIRKUS, BOOKLIST, PUBLISHERS’ WEEKLY, MIDWEST BOOK REVIEWS, MYSTERY SCENE MAGAZINE and SUSPENSE MAGAZINE. In that one, Lee’s ambitious young, female amateur sleuth, Wendy Winchester, solves the simultaneous poisoning of the four wealthy widows comprising the Rosalie Bridge Club.

In the just-released second installment—PLAYING THE DEVIL—Wendy decides to form her own bridge club (she’s hooked on the game!) because she was in line to join the one that is now wiped out. She is able to round up a table of four which she convenes at the Rosalie Country Club. The other three players are Deedah Hornesby, the RCC’s first female director, Hollis Hornesby, Deedah’s artist son, and Carly Ogle, wife of the RCC’s major contributor and benefactor, Brent Ogle.

But there’s much more to Brent than that. A former star college quarterback turned ‘personal injury/billboard’ lawyer, he is furious that the RCC has a female director, who has then turned around and hired the club’s first female golf pro. When Wendy and Deedah introduce bridge to the club, Brent fears they are trying to turn his ‘jock zone’ into a ladies’ ‘tea party.’ Used to throwing his weight around, he has become Rosalie’s most notorious bully, sexist, xenophobe and homophobe.

No sooner have Wendy and Deedah convened their first bridge game in the RCC’s Great Room, than Brent rolls in, feisty and annoyed that his two golfing partners have beaten him on the front nine for the first time ever. He then proceeds to get drunk, provoke a fist fight, which has to be broken up by the female golf pro, and then finishes by calling out everyone in the room. With a flourish, he then retires to the club’s outside hot tub to soak and pout.

Fate soon intervenes when a horrendous weather cell hovers over Rosalie, knocking out the power all over town and at the club for a good thirty minutes. When Carly decides to check on her husband during the blackout, she finds him dead in the tub, clubbed over the head with the pestle the barkeep uses to make his famous mint juleps.

The official investigation, conducted by Wendy’s detective boyfriend and Chief of Police father, begins once power is restored. So, who are the suspects beside the bartender? Who isn’t? Everyone inside the building was continually taunted, abused and mistreated by Brent. So it’s impossible to dismiss the possibility that anyone, besides the bartender, could have swiped the pestle and done the deed.

Wendy’s female editor and mentor orders up a separate investigation for the paper, and Wendy dives in, just as she did in GRAND SLAM MURDERS. But both investigations bog down. There are no prints or DNA around the hot tub because the water and steam have compromised any that existed. Meanwhile, the prints and DNA of everyone in the building at the time are everywhere abundant because they were all there all afternoon and evening, proving nothing. Furthermore, identities and whereabouts prove vexing to document because of the darkness. Glimpses of cell phone flashlights here and there aren’t much to go on or prove anything.

Wendy encounters twist after twist until she puts herself in harms’ way enough to come up with who was and who wasn’t involved in Brent Ogle’s death? Was it a solo crime? Or were two or more involved? Or—except for Wendy—was everyone at the RCC at the time in on it?

Don’t miss this follow-up to GRAND SLAM MURDERS, with the third installment—COLD READING MURDER by R. J. Lee—to follow this time next year.

R.J. Lee

About the Author

R. J. Lee follows in the mystery-writing footsteps of his father, R. Keene Lee, who wrote fighter pilot and detective stories for Fiction House, publishers of WINGS Magazine and other ‘pulp fiction’ periodicals in the late ’40’s and ’50’s. Lee was born and grew up in the Mississippi River port of Natchez but also spent thirty years living in the Crescent City of New Orleans. A graduate of the University of the South (Sewanee) where he studied creative writing under Sewanee Review editor, Andrew Lytle, Lee now resides in Oxford, Mississippi.

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