Today marks the release of The Bywayman, the third novel in my Deadly Byways series of crime thrillers set in southwestern Ohio in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
If you’ve been following the series, you know the basic idea behind Deadly Byways.
This is an ongoing story about crimes that unfold along the secondary roads, small towns, suburbs, and forgotten places of an earlier Ohio—the world before cell phones, GPS, security cameras, and the other technologies that now make it much more difficult to simply disappear.
And in The Bywayman, people are disappearing.
Three missing people—and almost nothing to connect them
A young hardware store clerk vanishes.
Then a jealous boyfriend disappears.
Then a college student goes missing, leaving her abandoned car beside an Ohio highway.
Detective Will Hayworth suspects that these disappearances are connected. The problem is proving it.
There are no bodies. There is no obvious common suspect. There isn’t even much physical evidence.
All Hayworth really has is a pattern—and the growing conviction that someone is hunting people along the roads outside Dayton.
Then the case changes.
A fourteen-year-old girl named Theresa Chapman narrowly escapes an attempted abduction on a lonely country road.
Suddenly, the police have something they have never had before.
A living witness.
Theresa can describe the man who tried to abduct her. She can describe his vehicle. She can work with a police artist to create a composite sketch.
For the first time, the predator has a face.
The local media gives him a name:
The Bywayman.
And the hunt begins.
But what if the police are hunting the wrong man?
That’s where The Bywayman becomes more than a straightforward serial-killer story.
One of the ideas that interested me while writing this novel was the enormous importance of information in a criminal investigation—and what happens when that information is unreliable.
A detective can be intelligent, experienced, and completely sincere. But every investigation depends upon what witnesses tell the police, what physical evidence appears to show, and what conclusions investigators draw from those facts.
Change one crucial piece of information, and you can change the entire direction of an investigation.
That idea lies at the heart of The Bywayman.
Will Hayworth knows that someone is out there.
The reader knows that someone is out there.
But knowing that a predator exists and knowing who that predator actually is are two very different things.
Sometimes a bad lead is worse than no lead at all.
A thriller set in the Ohio of the late 1970s
The historical setting is an important part of the Deadly Byways series.
The Bywayman takes place in 1979.
This isn’t the distant past, but it is a very different world from the one we inhabit today.
A teenager could leave a party and find herself walking down a dark two-lane road with no way to summon an Uber—or even call her parents without first finding a telephone.
A stranded motorist couldn’t pull out a smartphone and immediately summon roadside assistance.
There were no location-sharing apps. No text messages. No Ring doorbells recording everyone who approached a house. No ubiquitous digital trail documenting where everyone had been.
If you were alone on a country road at night, you really were alone.
And hitchhiking, while already recognized as potentially dangerous, was still something ordinary people did.
That combination makes the period particularly interesting for crime fiction.
The world was modern enough to be recognizable—but still isolated enough for people to vanish.
The roads themselves are part of the story.
I’ve lived in southwestern Ohio for most of my life, and I’ve always been fascinated by the contrast between the metropolitan areas and what lies just beyond them.
Drive a relatively short distance outside Cincinnati or Dayton, and the landscape changes.
The subdivisions give way to two-lane highways.
The highways pass through woods, farmland, and little communities.
There are stretches where houses are far apart and the road ahead disappears into darkness.
Today those places are less isolated than they once were, because almost everyone carries a communications and navigation device in their pocket.
In 1979, however, a breakdown on one of those roads could leave you genuinely stranded.
And a stranger who stopped to offer assistance might be exactly what he appeared to be.
Or he might not.
That uncertainty is part of the DNA of the Deadly Byways series.
The third installment of Deadly Byways
The Bywayman follows The Dungeon and The Bridge as the third novel in the series.
Although each book has its own major storyline, characters and events carry across the series, creating a larger narrative of crime and investigation in late-1970s and early-1980s Ohio.
With The Bywayman, that larger picture continues to expand.
Detective Will Hayworth is trying to understand a series of disappearances with very little evidence.
A frightened teenage girl becomes the most important witness in the investigation.
And somewhere outside Dayton, a predator is watching the police search for him.
He knows what they’re looking for.
More importantly, he knows they’re looking for the wrong thing.
The Bywayman (Deadly Byways Book 3) is available now on Amazon Kindle and is included with Kindle Unlimited.
