Lee Martin: Too Sane a Murder (USA 1986)

From the Publisher:
The cop was a lady. The kid was a psycho. But someone had committed...
TOO SANE A MURDER

THE THIN LINE BETWEEN SANITY AND MADNESS, BETWEEN INNOCENCE AND MURDEROUS GUILT.
Detective Deb Ralston was a crack investigator. Maybe the best on the Fort Worth force. Now she stood in the doorway of an expensive suburban home, looking at four adult bodies -- all shot at close range. She wasn't exactly ready when the kid came up behind her and asked for his bag of marbles.

Young as he was, Olead Baker had spent halt his life in mental institutions. The bruise on his shoulder was made by the stock of a twelve gauge shotgun. The killings had taken place in his house. Yet he said he was innocent. What's more. Deb believed him. But if she couldn't prove it, the charge was murder one, the penalty, death.

"RIVETING... (A) FASCINATING PUZZLE...A TAUT POLICE PROCEDURAL THAT MOVES WITH BRISK PACE AND OFFERS A DISTINCTIVELY DIFFERENT WOMAN COP WHO IS AN INTERESTING AND APPEALING HUMAN BEING." -- The Washington Post

Lee Martin: Too Sane a Murder. Dell, ISBN: 0440187435 (September, 1986), 184 p., $2.95.

Lee Martin: Too Sane a Murder (UK 1986)

From the Publisher:
It seemed an open-and-shut case when detective Deb Raiston of the Fort Worth major case squad arrived at the scene of the crime. There were four dead bodies in the room, a shotgun, and a suspect, a schizophrenic with a record of violence, who had spent most of the twenty-six years of his life in an institution. Who else but Olead Baker could possibly have killed his mother and his stepfather and their two guests and stomped their Persian cat to death? But for Deb - fifteen years a cop, but a mother for a whole lot longer than that - something doesn't quite click And as she investigates further, she becomes ever more intellectually and emotionally involved in the case.

TOO SANE A MURDER is an original, absorbing and touching first novel, revealing about abnormal psychology and based on a first hand knowledge of police work.

Lee Martin: Too Sane a Murder. Quartet Books Ltd., ISBN: 0704325918 (September, 1986), Quartet Qrime, 192 p., £?.??.