Cheat

Something is rotten at Hercules High School. Student Heather Sundergard has been caught cheating on the state’s most prestigious scholarship exam. One of Heather’s teachers, Carol Demeter, has been implicated—and fired by the school board. But Carol happens to be police chief Jim Otis. fiancée. Otis sees the fine hand in this scam of teenage femme fatale Josie Dobbs. But Josie’s “back east,” in college. 

Or is she?

Jim Otis’ struggle to exonerate Carol sends him into his own small town’s underworld and into the snakepit of school board meetings. His quest moves on to a dive bar in the state capitol to meet Carol’s alleged secret lover and into the teeth of a brawl between the Konicek brothers. After staging a panty raid that might prove Carol’s innocence, Otis is forced into a deadly cat-and-mouse game in a strange forest, pitted against the seductive and precocious girl who has been his nemesis since he arrived in Hercules.

David Benjamin is a lifelong storyteller. His fiction includes The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked and seven books under his new imprint, Last Kid Books: Three’s a Crowd, A Sunday Kind of Love, Almost Killed by a Train of Thought: Collected Essays, Summer of ’68, Skulduggery in the Latin Quarter, Black Dragon and Jailbait.  As a journalist, Benjamin has edited newspapers, published and edited several magazines, and authored SUMO: A Thinking Fan’s Guide to Japan’s National Sport. In its first year, Benjamin’s imprint, Last Kid Books, won six independent press awards. His essays have appeared in publications that include the Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Examiner, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, EE Times and Common Dreams. Benjamin and his wife Junko Yoshida have been married for ages. They live sometimes in Madison, Wisconsin and sometimes in Paris.