Excerpt: 'Killer Summer'

June 29, 2009— -- In Ridley Pearson's third crime novel starring Walt Fleming, the amiable sheriff in Sun Valley, Idaho, the lawman faces a master thief planning to steal three very expensive bottles of wine at the annual wine auction. They were purported to be gifts from Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, but were they really?

Read an excerpt of the book below and head to the "GMA" Library for more good reads.

Walt Fleming didn't want to be in the river. Any free time away from the office shouldhave been spent applying for a loan of a hundred thousand dollars. That, or risk losing his house, and his daughters, to the divorce. But credit was tight, time short, and so there he was, along with his nephew, Kevin, knee- deep in the Big Wood River. The evening outing was a favor to his sister- in- law, Myra, who could guilt- trip along with the best of them.

Kevin, who would turn nineteen in August, glanced over at his uncle, looking away from the fly he was tying on his own line.

"What?" Walt asked, water gurgling past his waders.

He slipped on a pair of sunglasses to protect against flying hooks, and the glare of an evening sun. At eight- thirty p.m., it still shone brightly in the summer sky. Behind Walt, a rock wall rose out of the gurgling and bubbling river water, reaching two thousand feet nearly straight up into the cobalt sky. Dusk would linger well past ten, during which time the best fishing of the day would be had."No uniform."

"Once a sheriff, always a sheriff? You've seen me out of uniform plenty of times. Don't give me that."

"Not recently."

"Then obviously we haven't been spending enough time together," Walt said. "Which is why we're here in the first place."

Kevin remained on the shore, poised as if reluctant to enter the water. A narrow concrete- and- steel bridge crossed fifty feet downstream, carrying the cracked asphalt of Croy Creek Road from downtown Hailey, Idaho, west into rugged terrain. Walt had parked the Jeep Cherokee in a dusty turnout before the bridge. The license plate read bcs- 1— Blaine County Sheriff, vehicle 1. Walt glanced east over Kevin's head, up the slight rise at the town he called home. With a population of three thousand, Hailey was smaller than its famous neighbors to the north, Ketchum and Sun Valley, but larger than Bellevue to the south. The valley was defined by mountain ranges east and west, shaped into an upside- down V, the mouth of which emptied into a great plain of high desert populated by nothing more than rodents, rattlers, and lava rock.