One Bloody Shirt at a Time book page

Deputy Ricos Tale 1
by Elizabeth A. Garcia

One Bloody Shirt at a Time was awarded
2014 First Place in Police/Crime Fiction

Deputy Margarita Ricos and her partner, Deputy Barney George, are entrusted with preserving the peace and upholding the law in a land where the flowers and people grow wild. Margarita is not just any deputy. She’s smart. She’s courageous. She’s a twenty-five-year-old Chicana with attitude who grew up on the edge of the United States in Terlingua, Texas, an unincorporated settlement built around a mercury mining ghost town of the same name.

Crime in south Brewster County is seldom violent, and usually does not come in the form of murder or rape. Yet Norma Bates, a married, forty-five year old, mother of three, is found dead on her kitchen floor, lying in a pool of blood. There is a single stab wound in her chest.

Deputy Ricos is about to conduct an interview about the murder when she receives a call from the sheriff. He says he has a couple from Terlingua in his office claiming their fourteen-year-old daughter was raped. Since Margarita is young, and known to the girl, perhaps she can get her to open up. The deputy is stunned by the sheriff’s news. Murder—and now rape—what is going on in Terlingua?

As the deputies work to solve both crimes, a sinister presence approaches Margarita in her home in the dark. Is it a murder suspect, or the unknown rapist, or a different kind of threat altogether?