One for the Road

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Synopsis

A small-town reporter must investigate a murder in a motel—before he becomes the story—in this mystery from an Edgar Award winner and “real pro” (The New York Times Book Review). For his first mystery in two years, Fredric Brown gives us the story of a baffling murder in a small town in Arizona and a young newspaper man's efforts to solve it. The narrator is Bob Spitzer, newspaperman, for a small weekly newspaper in a small provincial town, the "Weekly Sun" of Mayville, Arizona. One day the owner, administrator, director and editor-in-chief Sydney M. Hetherton, tasks him with looking into a crime that has just occurred in the local motel: A woman named Amy Waggoner has been found naked and stabbed to death on the premises. Bob just wants to marry his girlfriend Doris, get a proper job, and also find out just who stabbed Amy Waggoner, the blonde lush living well beyond her means at the motel. She had only been in town a few weeks. She had little luggage, a not-too-new car, the alimony sent to her by her ex-husband's lawyer, and an insatiable thirst for whiskey. Amy is already dead when the story begins; it is unclear just what she was doing in such a small and out-of-the-way town in the first place and why anyone would mean her any harm given that she was an apparent stranger to everyone. Apart from drinking through her weekly alimony check, she seems to do little else, returning alone to her motel room every night. She hadn’t made any particular friends or enemies, with the possible exception of local simpleton Herbie Pembrook, who was caught peeping through her bedroom once. It is the first murder that the inexperienced Bob Spitzer has had to deal with. When the call came from Birdie Edwards, owner of the motel, Bob accompanied the Chief of Police to the scene. As the reporter and the police chief survey the lurid scene, Spitzer reflects on the fact that he once showed a romantic interest in the victim—a fact that could put the spotlight of suspicion directly on hi