Burning Girl

“This guy delivers the real goods – whether writing about a private eye named Haptmann or a Rhode Island cop named Riisa Jones. In Burning Girl, Riisa acquits herself well when the incinerated body of a woman turns up in a dumpster. Go for this Whodunit Award winner!”
- H.L. Osterman, Walter the Weirdo Solves a Murder

Detective Riisa Jones is a new detective with her first case as lead investigator for the Gallion, Rhode Island P.D. It’s a bad one: the body of a young woman has been set ablaze in a dumpster behind a local tavern, well known to the cops. Some of her colleagues, including her own partner “Kaz,” a veteran cop nearing retirement, wouldn’t mind seeing her fail. Riisa’s first obstacle is identifying the body. Before long, she’s neck-deep in a case that twists out of her reach every time she follows a lead. Those dead ends are piling up and so is the pressure to solve this horrific case. Riisa finds herself digging past the lies of respectable people to uncover some dirty secrets, and she had better hurry because there are killers behind those liars who are watching and paying attention to her.

Robb White lives in Northeastern Ohio close to the house where he grew up. Many of his crime stories feature private investigator Thomas Haftmann, the protagonist of several earlier novels: Haftmann’s Rules (2011) and Saraband for a Runaway (2013). A third novel, When You Run with Wolves, was published in 2015. He has a collection of short stories titled Out of Breath and Other Stories (2013) that mixes mainstream and crime fiction. Until he retired from college teaching this year, White wrote book reviews and conducted interviews for the print magazine Boxing World. His short story “Frotteur in the Dark” was selected by the editors of 10,000 Tons of Black Ink of Chicago as one of 6 Best Of for 2009. Special Collections, an ebook crime novel featuring a female detective and an obese academic book thief, won the Electronic Book Competition of 2014 hosted by New Rivers Press (Mankato State University at Moorhead, MN). Recently published was another entry in his popular mystery series, Thomas Haftmann, Private Eye: The Short Stories (2020).