Publisher's Jacket Summary:

Summer in Benteen County, Kansas, is a season possessed of all the gentle subtlety of an act of war. Winter, of course, is no better, but remembrance of its frosts and blizzards and winds that begin to suck away your life before you walk a dozen steps has grown faint by the early hours of a Sunday morning in late June.

While some try to sleep, and some like Sheriff English and his ex-wife try sex, the Reverend Peter Simms takes an early walk in the park and encounters someone counting coup. When the Sheriff's part-Cheyenne brother, Mad Dog, arrives to meditate, he finds the Reverend's mutilated corpse.

Mad Dog is the obvious suspect and begins to hang out in the town jail while Sheriff English widens his net and picks up not only several suspicious characters, but an increasingly dark history for the Simms family. The case grows stormier. Soon, so does the weather. As a tornado gathers to hurl its fury on the hapless town, the fury of the killer rises to meet it.

 About the author:

J.M. Hayes has been an anthropologist, an archaeologist, and supervised youth camping, sports, and recreation programs. He was born and raised on the flat earth of central Kansas where Mad Dog & Englishman takes place. He graduated from Wichita State University and did another three years of post-graduate work at the University of Arizona. He fell in love with jagged horizons and fabulous desert vistas and has stayed more than 30 years now.

He does some free-lance writing, including occasional book reviews for Tucson's The Arizona Daily Star and shares a home in Tucson, AZ, with his wife, two computers, 4000 or so books, two German Shepherds, and a Scottish "Terror."

Comment: This is an entertaining and well-written mystery that can be read in an evening.
The author has a good sense of rural Kansas and says the fictional Benteen County "bears a striking resemblance" to (what else?) Reno County. He's from Partridge, southwest of Hutchinson.
Recommended.
--Dick Lipsey.