I found Ken Casper’s As the Crow Dies a competent mystery. I neither loved it nor disliked it. I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t like it more than I did. The characters are well drawn, the prose professional (always a pleasure, that), and the mystery puzzling (though I did guess the murderer before the end).

Jason Crow, son of a successful local restaurant owner, comes home to his West Texas town in 1968, a double amputee from wounds received in the Vietnam War. Once an NFL hopeful, he’s self-conscious about his disability, and insecure about his future with his girlfriend, Michiko.

His reunion with his wise, supportive father, to which he’s looked forward greatly, is not to be. He comes home to find police cars in the driveway, and he’s told his father has shot himself in his office—with Jason’s own gun.

Jason cannot believe his father would ever do such an insensitive thing. So, relying on his army buddy Zach, who has become a sort of personal attendant, he sets about discovering who among their friends and relations hated his father—and him—enough to commit murder in this way.

There are lots of leads, pointing in various directions. There’s enough infidelity, old hate, and bigotry in the town to provide a snake’s nest of motives. The depiction of Jason’s growing maturity as he learns to live a new kind of life is one of the book’s strengths.

I think my main problem with As the Crow Dies was that something I usually like in a story—lots of well-drawn, well-rounded characters—in this case produces soap opera moments from time to time. I was worried about anti-Christianity, but although a cultish “church” does provide some suspects, that church is so unorthodox that it doesn’t really come close to home.

You may like it more than I did. I don’t disrecommend it. Cautions for language and adult situations. As is so common nowadays, premarital sex is generally taken for granted.