Publication date: June 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-0692453667
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1930s BEACH HAVEN, NEW JERSEY
Nickname: “Queen City”
Size: 2.3 square miles
Pop.: Roughly 700...and shrinking…

What begins with a bizarre murder – a cross-dressing local’s body found in his house, mutilated and decomposing, with a cryptic bible passage scrawled in blood on the refrigerator – becomes one man’s hunt for the truth in a seemingly bucolic, New Jersey shore town’s hidden maze of lies, hatred, lust and death.

In their own, shoddy way, the police had just put to bed – even if it wasn't properly solved – the Schweickert case when a new scandal rocked the town: A series of disappearances of women, tied together with a common thread – each of them was an amateur poetess published in the local newspaper. The patrons of Lewis Porter’s bar – and the police – had their own snide, simplistic theories as to why wives would run off. When a friend of Porter’s wife disappears, she asks him to look into it. What Porter finds looking back is a mystery that leads him through a labyrinth of wrong turns and dead ends – from the beaches to the Pinelands – and to deadlier, darker answers, about the town, its people...and himself.

In Thomas Reeder’s expert hands, strand after strand of this intricately woven mystery comes together to create Poetic Justice: a tapestry of sin and suspense that will envelop and keep you breathlessly rapt from beginning to end.

Thomas Reeder grew up outside Philadelphia, addicted to late night B movies, Shock Theater and any silent film that would occasionally surface. A lifelong love of all things cinematic led to a BFA in Film at New York's School of Visual Arts and an MA in Cinema Studies at New York University. Concurrent with this was an immersion in the written word from a disparate array of authors of mysteries that ran the gamut from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and S.S. Van Dine, to Mickey Spillane and Lawrence Block.

Mr. Reeder's biography of film producer Ben Pivar – Stop Yellin': Ben Pivar and the Horror, Mystery and Action Adventure Films of His Universal B Unit – was published in 2011, and he has written numerous articles for film and genealogical periodicals. His biography of silent comedy pioneer Henry "Pathé" Lehrman is scheduled for publication in 2016.

Poetic Justice is his first foray into fiction, inspired in part by his love for Long Beach Island, where he spends his summers. Mr. Reeder lives in Hopewell, New Jersey, with his family.