Descent Into Madness

Penman Productions

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Thomas Martindale’s first task in Descent Into Madness, his sixth appearance as an amateur sleuth, is to get out of jail and clear his name. Arrested and falsely accused of killing a close friend, Maxine March, the college professor has got to find the real killer in order to prove his innocence. With the help of his attorney, Lorenzo Madrid, and an old friend, the Army Special Ops officer Paul Bickford, Martindale starts with his nemesis from last year’s book, Searching For Murder, Duncan Delgado. He suspects the deranged biologist of killing March, as well as concocting a scheme to use human subjects in deadly virus research. The task for him is to prove it.

His search leads him to an abandoned and spooky sanitarium in Oregon’s Coast Range where he finds a murderous Mexican drug gang, an inquisitive old lady, and a missing moose amid the bats, rats, cobwebs, and horrors of past treatment schemes for the mentally ill and those with debilitating physical ailments.

Descent Into Madness is the latest in a series of Thomas Martindale Mysteries by Ron Lovell, a retired Oregon State University journalism professor and former magazine journalist. Other books in the series are Murder at Yaquina Head, Dead Whales Tell No Tales, Lights, Camera, MURDER!, Murder Below Zero, and Searching for Murder.

New in 2007 is a Penman Productions edition of Lights, Camera, MURDER!, first published by Sunstone Press in 2004. This story of the killing of a coed takes place against the backdrop of the rivalry between colleges to attract new students and a grade inflation scandal involving black athletes.

All of the books in the series, trade paperbacks priced at $15, are available through Penman Productions or through a local bookstore. Lovell is available for readings, signings, and writing workshops.