DWD's Reviews

Published in 2001 by Books In Motion. Read by Rusty Nelson. Duration: 11 hours, 59 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Sheriff Bill Gastner is coming to the end of his appointed term as Sheriff of Posadas County - a border county in southern New Mexico. Bill has been in the department in one form of another for 31 years and he is looking forward to a well-deserved retirement with no real plans for how to fill his days. Bill Gastner has got a wild last few days as Sheriff  - he has a drunken teen driver with a fake driver's license issue by the department of motor vehicles, two damaged police cars, two other teens in the hospital, and more. My Review: I am a big fan of this series. I love old Bill Gastner - he has insomnia, happily eats the same pepper-filled burrito at the same restaurant 2 or even 3 meals per day, and relies on experience more than the speed an agility of younger officers. But, this book was padded with a whole lot of nothing. We meet Gastner's son and grandson who...

  Pu blished in 2008 by Books In  Motion. Originally published in 1999. Read by Rusty Nelson. Duration: 8 hours, 56 minutes. Unabridged. In Out of Season things are not going well for Undersheriff Bill Gastner, the second in command of the Posadas County Sheriff Department in southern New Mexico. He is planning to retire in a few months and the person he had hoped he would take over for him is moving out of state. He found out another officer has applied to a much larger department where there are more opportunities.  Things get even worse, though. A woman that most would consider more than a little mentally off balance calls the department and says that she has seen a struggling small plane disappear behind a mesa near her home. She says that it must have crashed. When a deputy checks it out, he spots wreckage. When they finally get close they find two bodies - and one of them is the Sheriff, a man who notoriously hates to ride in planes. When Gastner and the department...

Published by Books in Motion in 2008. Read by Rusty Nelson. Duration: 8 hours, 57 minutes. Unabridged. Undersheriff Bill Gastner returns in Privileged to Kill , another mystery set in a sleepy New Mexico county on the Mexican border set in the mid-1990's. However, in this story, Posadas County is anything but sleepy. To be fair, the story starts out sleepy enough with Bill Gastner feeling his age and talking with a a 51 year-old stranded bicyclist with a busted tire that he picks up on the side of the road just for the heck of it and totes him, his bike and all of his equipment into town. Bill and the bicyclist become friendly and the bicyclist heads off to make camp somewhere and then move on the next morning after he gets his tire fixed. But, things pick up quickly when Gastner gets a phone call in the middle of the night. A freshman girl has been found dead under the bleachers at the high school football field and the bicycle rider was camped nearby and he has been arrested. ...

A Review of the Audiobook Published by Books in Motion in 2015 Read by Beth Richmond Duration: 11 hours, 40 minutes Unabridged This is my eleventh Posadas County mystery. I have been with Bill Gastner when he was on patrol, when he was being lowered into a mine to find a kidnapper, when he was fighting a man in a little plane and through a whole lot of extra-spicy burritos. Sadly, Bill is a minor character in this book. I understand why - when the series started out he was already old for a sheriff. Now, he's retired and really can't go out and fight bad guys so much. Estelle Reyes-Guzman and Bob Torres carry the load in this book. I enjoyed the Torres story line, but found the Reyes-Guzman story line to be poorly paced and exceptionally wordy (never a problem with Torres since he famously says as little as possible). The Reyes-Guzman story line features a former resident of a Mexican border town that has spent most of his adult life in prison. This character speaks ...

Published by Books in Motion Read by Rusty Nelson Duration: 6 hours, 55 minutes Unabridged Sixty-two year old Undersheriff Bill Gastner is recovering from heart surgery. He has been told to get out and exercise more and to get away from work. You see, Gastner has a lot of bad habits when he works. He doesn't sleep, he gets involved in things that get him hurt and he eats large, spicy burritos. So, Bill decides to go on a camping trip and visit a former colleague, Estelle Reyes-Guzman, who has taken a job in the sheriff department of a different county in New Mexico - up in the mountains. But, while he is trying to sleep in a campground he hears sirens and sees lights so he decides to go check it out. Soon enough, Bill is working with Reyes-Guzman and investigating a murder, looking into a smooth-talking hippie-type who quotes the Bible and brandishes a gun and eventually ends up questioning a priest. Heck of a vacation, huh? This was an interesting change of geography fo...

Originally Published in 1996. Audio edition published by Books in Motion in 2002. Read by Rusty Nelson Duration: 9 hours, 17 minutes Unabridged Posadas County New Mexico Undersheriff Bill Gastner is having a bad night. He almost gets shot substituting as the policeman on duty at the local high school basketball game, the suspect dies in custody and then someone shoots and kills a deputy sheriff and nearly kills a reporter on the side of the road with a shotgun. The investigation begins in earnest following the slimmest of leads with Gastner and company looking for a killer before the only known witnesses dies and looking for another missing witness before the killer strikes again... The audiobook of Before She Dies starts out like a rocket but the second act gets bogged down in the minutiae of a police procedural. The third act picks up though and the book ends on a strong note. The reading by Rusty Nelson was solid except when he tries to read in Spanish. The author'...

When Bill met Estelle... Published in 2012 by Blackstone Audio Read by Ray Porter Duration: 10 hours, 31 minutes Unabridged In this prequel to the series, Bill Gastner is investigating the death of a road grader operator. He is found dead in the cab of the grader with a bullet in his brain, having been shot by a single shot straight through the front windshield. There are no witnesses so Bill starts to dig through the victim's past to find out if there are any potential enemies that might have wanted to hurt him. As he starts to investigate the sheriff department's new hire, Estelle Reyes, a rookie straight out of college, goes along for the ride while Gastner tries to familiarize her with the department's procedures. And, of course, the more they dig the more they find secrets that most people would just prefer stay buried... This is a solid mystery - I sort of had it figured out about 2/3 of the way through but for all of the wrong reasons. But, the most interest...

Originally published in 1998. Published in 2008 by Books in Motion.  Read by Rusty Nelson. Duration: 9 hours, 46 minutes. Unabridged. I have been reading the Bill Gastner series off and on again for nearly 10 years. This is one of those series that never really took off but it certainly should have. If you enjoy Tony Hillerman's Leaphorn and Chee novels then you should give this series a try. This is book #6 in a series that depends on the reader having some at least some prior knowledge of the characters. I have read some of the earlier books and some of the later books so that I wasn't lost when it came to the non-mystery part of the story. Bill Gastner is a cranky old undersheriff, which is an office in New Mexico. Basically, the sheriff of a county is an elected position and is designed to be held by someone who is not a member of law enforcement. An undersheriff is a professional who works with the sheriff and makes sure that things operate they way they are suppos...

     I just love Bill Gastner This series actually extends over the careers of two law officers who hold a position called Undersheriff in the fictional Posadas County, New Mexico.  An undersheriff is the person right below the elected position of Sheriff and is appointed by the Sheriff.  Generally, the Undersheriff would be the expert in the law that is there to advise the elected Sheriff. The first half of the series covers Undersheriff Bill Gastner, an experienced law officer. Bill would laugh at that at just say that he is old. Bill is sort of grumpy, a little creeky in the knees, moves slowly but makes up for it with a lot of experience and really knowing the people of Posadas County, New Mexico.  He is especially good at thinking while eating very spicy burritos at all hours of the day or night. The second half of the series covers the career of Undersheriff Estelle Guzman. She is quite talented and, for me, simply not as interesting as Bill...

Posadas County Mysteries Are Just Not As Good Without Bill Gastner First published in 2002. Synopsis: The Posadas County Sheriff's office is short-handed when it gets word that a pilot spotted a body that has been shot in the middle-of-nowhere. Literally, in the middle-of-nowhere - not near a road, a train track, a business or anything. The bullets were fired just in hearing range of a gravel pit but no one thinks twice about bullets being fired in the New Mexico countryside because people hunt or shoot at varmints on a regular basis. So, new Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman and her team start to dig into what they have - a body in the desert and no other clues. Soon enough, they discover more, including a local connection to what may be an international crime spree (although, it's not hard to be international so close to such a porous border). With the addition of the sudden death of a suspected animal trafficker in a fiery explosion, the new Undersheriff has her hands ...

Originally published in 1991. Bill Gastner is the cantankerous, ornery old Undersheriff of Posadas County in southern New Mexico. An undersheriff is the person right below the elected position of Sheriff and is appointed by the Sheriff. In the case of fictional Posadas County, the Sheriff is a former used car salesman who is a heck of a businessman but does not know much about law enforcement. So, Bill is literally the old hand that knows his way around the law and the county. Also, he is afraid that the Sheriff might drop him because he's in his sixties and generally considered to be an old grump. Gastner is a widower and an insomniac who will work 20 hours a day if he can. Why not? His kids are grown up and out of the house, he has no love life and he prefers his own company to just about anyone else's. A Southern New Mexico Landscape. Photo by NMTrey. One night while out on one of his volunteer patrols he listens to radio talk about a car filled with teenagers. A ...

Wonderful I absolutely love the Bill Gastner series. I have read a few unsatisfying novels lately and Dead Weight was a real joy. Gastner is the nearly 70-year-old insomniac sherrif of a small town in New Mexico. He consumes great quantities of coffee and very spicy Mexican food (even for breakfast!) while he juggles a homicide investigation, a mysterious accusation against one of his officers and a landlord/renter dispute. Small town politics and good police work don't necessarily go hand-in-hand, but Gastner makes it work anyway. Havill's characters remind me very much of those of fellow New Mexican author Tony Hillerman. For me, this is very high praise since I absolutely love the Leaphorn/Chee novels. If Havill and Hillerman are par for the course in the world of New Mexican authors than I am going to looking for more of them. Truly a delightful read. I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Dead Weight by Steven H...

Well depicted characters make this one a winner! The mystery is not all that mysterious. No international criminal ring threatens. National Security and the fate of the free world do not depend on what happens in Posadas County, New Mexico and its tired and ready to retire Undersheriff Bill Gastner. That, of course, is the charm and strength of Out of Season . Posadas County, New Mexico's small sheriff''s department suffers the loss of its well-intentioned but inexperienced Sheriff in a plane accident - except it looks like it was not an accident after all - the pilot was shot before he crashed. Undersheriff Gastner looks into the private investigation that the Sheriff was looking into and finds that his inexperienced boss may have had good instincts after all. First, let me praise what Havill does best in this book - character development. Gastner is a tired old horse who is ready to go out to pasture but when duty calls the value of his years of experience...

Not up to the standards of later Gastner mysteries Having read several of the later Undersherrif Bill Gastner mysteries I found myself a little torn with Twice Buried . I love the character of Bill Gastner. The characters in this series are particularly well-developed and realistic. The procedures in this book are thorough and seemingly well-depicted (I'm not a police officer but it seemed pretty kosher to me) except for one very large hole in the way the investigation developed - a whole line of investigation was ignored that seemed obvious to me. This hurt the integrity of the book in my eyes but I still give it 4 stars. If you are a fan of Tony Hillerman's Navajo Tribal Police books you should check out this series. I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Twice Buried . Reviewed on December 29, 2008.