Dead Shot

The high-school gym in Hercules, Wisconsin is haunted, by a basketball player, John Roszak, whose death on the court in 1968 haunts the gym and harasses living players like Stewart McCullough. Stewy doesn’t believe in ghosts but his new girlfriend, Meryl, convinces Stewy to reach out to his personal ghost. 

While Stewy deals with his otherworldly specter, another—mortal—danger begins stalking him. Clay Lutz has come back to town. He has made it his mission to carry off the girl—Meryl—whom he regards as his personal property.

Dead Shot, fourth in the Jim Otis crime series, follows a tense cat-and-mouse struggle with Clay Lutz that frustrates police chief Otis chief and steadily escalates into deadly violence. 

As the basketball season progresses, Stewy and Meryl fall in love and develop an eerie rapport with the enigma of John Roszak. But they find themselves living—and dancing—under a cloud cast both by the living and the dead.

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.