“Death on the Bijou,” Tom Lubben’s second mystery novel, was published in April. It focuses on the ongoing character BJ Gleeson, a struggling former teacher/ coach now morphing into a private investigator.
BJ Gleeson is walking along a water bed, one year after Hurricane Katrina savaged New Orleans. He arrived in the Big Easy to give a keynote address at a national mystery writers’ conference. He was asked to speak the prior year, but the conference had to be rescheduled. His positive experiences with a string of brutal murders in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey developed a small amount of notoriety for this amateur detective.
He is just doing some general exploring when he notices a commotion at the side of the water. Police and emergency trucks arrive to retrieve some bodies. As he moves toward the action, he sees a naked woman being dragged up from the shoreline. She is naked from the waist up and her body has been badly mangled. As she is pulled up by the emergency crew, an elderly black woman bystander covers her mouth and calls out, “It’s the Wookie, at it again!”