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 began his career as a storyteller in Mrs. Poss’ second-grade class at St. Mary’s School in Tomah, Wisconsin. His fictional memoir, The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked, originally published by Random House, was reprinted by Last Kid Books in 2019. His Last Kid Books include a collection of his essays, Almost Killed by a Train of Thought, two  short story anthologies, The Melting Grandmother and Other Short Works and Christmas in a Jugular Vein and sixteen novels, Three’s a Crowd, A Sunday Kind of Love, Summer of ’68, Skulduggery in the Latin Quarter, Black Dragon, They Shot Kennedy, Fat Vinny’s Forbidden Love, Witness to the Crucifixion, Choose Moose, Bistro Nights, The Voice of the Dog and Benjamin’s Jim Otis mystery series, Jailbait, Bastard’s Bluff, Woman Trouble, Dead Shot and Cheat. 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.

Since its launch in 2019, Benjamin’s publishing imprint, Last Kid Books, has won more than forty independent-press awards. These include, for They Shot Kennedy, the Midwest Book Awards’ 2021 grand prize for literary/historical/contemporary fiction, and a 2022 Silver Medal for Humor to Fat Vinny’s Forbidden Love in the Independent Book Publishers Association’s prestigious Benjamin Franklin Awards.

Benjamin and his wife, Junko Yoshida, have been married for ages. They live sometimes in Madison, Wis., and the rest of the time in Paris.