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 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.