The South’s wealthiest, most dysfunctional family is back,
with old scores to settle and a surprising houseguest.
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Red Pines
Trapnell Thriller Book 3
by Jill Hand
Genre: Thriller
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“In this hilarious third installment, Jill Hand gives us the weirdest, funniest family saga yet.”
–Wayne Turmel, author of Johnny Lycan: The Werewolf PI series
The discovery of the bodies of two “honky-tonk hitmen” on land belonging to a former relative brings the Trapnell siblings, self-centered Aimee, indolent Trainor, and brilliant Marsh, back to White Oaks, their opulent ancestral home. FBI Special Agent Carson Burns is tasked with protecting them, something she finds increasingly difficult, as sinister events keep occurring which barely avoid being fatal.
Adding to the confusion is a deposed dictator who has eluded his Secret Service watchdogs and is pretending to be Marsh’s valet.
It becomes clear that someone intends to murder the Trapnells, but who? And why? A rapper called Baby Patty Cake insists the Illuminati are to blame, but that can’t be true, can it?
What readers are saying:
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Author Jill Hand has crafted a thriller that offers the ideal balance of humor and suspense to create a delightfully entertaining experience filled with quirky characters and unexpected twists. The dysfunctional dynamics of the Trapnell family are an absolute joy and a great foil to play off during the biggest surprises of the plot, while the witty dialogue and eccentric scenarios provide plenty of laughs along the way. The clues unfold at a great pace to allow us to figure things out alongside Agent Burns, yet the reader is kept in a fair amount of suspense about the true motives behind the attempts on the Trapnells’ lives, leading to a satisfying and surprising conclusion. Overall, Red Pines is a captivating read that offers equal parts humor and suspense, making it a must-read for fans of comedic thrillers everywhere.
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Dooley Voight drove them the thirty-five miles from the airport to Cobbs, a sleepy village not far from the Florida border. Cobbs had been the domain of the Trapnell family for generations. On the outskirts of town was their plantation house, White Oaks. It sprawled, vast and palatial, under the late afternoon sun, its meticulously tended green lawns, columned portico and dazzling white façade a vision of opulence.
Holy cow, thought Burns, stunned by the sight. It’s a genuine Georgia plantation. Leave it to Bad Choices to own a plantation.
As if he had read her thoughts, Marsh said, “A penny for your thoughts, Agent Burns.”
“My thoughts aren’t worth a penny,” she replied.
“I sincerely doubt that. I’ll show you around later. There are many interesting things to see at White Oaks. There’s a graveyard that’s supposed to be haunted, and a room where one of my ancestors kept his wife imprisoned for twenty years. The story goes that it stemmed from the having a disagreement over a game of whist. The scratches are still visible on the back of the door, where she clawed at it in a futile attempt to escape.”
“Great,” said Burns. “Can’t wait to see that.”
“I sure do enjoy comin’ out here to y’all’s stately home,” Dooley said to Marsh as he piloted his Lexus up the mile-long drive paved with white oyster shells. The shells crunched under the car’s tires as it rolled along at a sedate five miles per hour.
Dooley had the air-conditioning turned up. The thermometer on the dashboard registered eight-eight degrees Fahrenheit. That was considered normal, even a bit cool for Cobbs in late May. It would be another month before the real heat would set in, causing all outdoor activity to grind to a torpid, tropical crawl.
Aimee was already having reservations about returning to her ancestral home. The last time she was there, she and Marsh and Trainor, as well as their stepsister, Karen, had almost been murdered. The time before that, Trainor had allowed their father to strangle a sideshow performer Bad things had a way of happening at White Oaks.
Aimee resolved to watch her back. She hoped the level-headed presence of Special Agent Burns would be a calming influence.
“This is the second time today I been here,” Dooley remarked as they approached the circular turnaround in front of the house. In the center a marble fountain in the shape of a pod of dolphins sent jets of water into the air.
Pulled up to the portico steps was Blanton’s white 1959 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith. Its tall, stainless steel radiator grille was topped by a sculpture of a crouching woman, her robes billowing out behind her. “Nellie in her Nightie,” was how jocular Rolls-Royce factory workers used to refer to the mascot, although its official name was the Spirit of Ecstasy. Parked behind the Rolls was a cherry-red BMW XM sedan.
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Black Willows
Trapnell Thriller Book 2
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A mysterious cowboy is stalking the eccentric Trapnell siblings. Is he a supernatural entity or a hired killer? To complicate things, the will making them heirs to their billionaire father’s estate is missing and a relative has returned from a watery grave.
Last time, the Trapnells saved the world from destruction. This time they may not be able to save themselves. Black Willows is a darkly funny Southern-fried adventure, complete with Voodoo, arson, and alligators.
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“And then,” Palmer Trapnell told an architect named Chase Merriweather, “An alarm will sound, one of those that goes aoogah! aoogah! The room will start filling up with ice-cold water and everyone will have to swim to safety. What do you think of that?”
Merriweather looked over Palmer’s shoulder to where her husband stood. Trainor Trapnell was shaking his head and frantically waving his hands, as if to say, No way! That’s insane!
“Well,” the architect said cautiously. “It’s an interesting concept.”
“I know! Escape rooms are popular right now. My friend Chandler Woodbury has one. It’s at Lakeland Mall, between Razzle-Dazzle Doughnuts and Sweet and Sassy Lingerie, where that store that sold things like blacklight posters and lava lamps used to be. You have to find clues to figure out how to escape from a room done up like a library in a spooky old mansion. This will be much better.”
Palmer beamed complacently. Her sandy blonde hair was cut in an asymmetrical style popularized by an actress with a starring role in a daytime television drama. Palmer was a former dog groomer who had advanced several rungs up the social ladder by marrying Trainor. With her bright pink lipstick and Lilly Pulitzer twin set, she was the apotheosis of an affluent young Atlanta matron.
Palmer and Chandler Woodbury, ostensibly friends, were locked in a mortal combat of one-upmanship. If Chandler had an escape room then Palmer wanted a better one.
“But the logistics,” Trainor said desperately. He drew up a chair and seated himself next to his wife at the polished mahogany conference table in Merriweather’s office. He spread his hands in mute appeal to the architect to put an end to this nonsense. “That’s what they’re called, right? Logistics? Ways of doin’ things? You can’t fill up a room up with water and make people swim out. It’s not safe. What if somebody drowns? And how do you empty the water out afterwards? I don’t see it.”
He turned to Palmer who had folded her arms across her chest and was pouting. “I’m sorry, Chicken Legs, but I think it might be illegal.”
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White Oaks
Trapnell Thriller Book 1
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“An ingeniously dark comic thriller about greed, gluttony and murder that is destined for the big screen.” –Best Thrillers
Aimee Trapnell reluctantly leaves her apartment on Manhattan’s Central Park West to return to her childhood home in Georgia for her father’s ninetieth birthday. Also on hand are her two brothers, wily Marsh and ne’er-do-well Trainor. With a forty-billion-dollar inheritance at stake, they’re willing to do whatever it takes to make the old man happy.
To their shock they learn that what their father wants for his birthday is to kill someone. He doesn’t care who it is. He just wants to know what it’s like to commit murder.
Betrayal, double-dealing, and fast-paced action set the Trapnells on a collision course with an unexpected villain. Their journey takes them from the swamps of Georgia, to Italy’s glittering Amalfi coast, to rugged Yellowstone National Park.
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Chapter 31 – What Peewee Pelletier Found
Earlier that morning a man named Pewee Pelletier drove his pickup truck through a gap in the tall privet hedge in front of White Oaks. A discrete metal sign, white letters on a forest green background, declared it to be the service entrance to the estate.
The truck’s tires crunched on the gravel roadbed as Pewee drove past the kitchen wing, past the greenhouses and the water cascade, water burbling over its stone steps, and down beyond the old slave graveyard. He parked beside the white granite mausoleum. TRAPNELL was carved in stern block letters in the triangular pediment above the door.
It’s only seven-fifteen and already it’s hot as a crotch, Peewee thought, squinting at the white disc that was the sun, blazing mercilessly above the tangle of trees marking the beginning of the swamp. He wanted to finish the day’s work early and go fishing. He’d sweep out the mausoleum and get it looking shipshape for Blanton Trapnell’s big sendoff. Then he’d swing by Holy Redeemer and White Knoll cemeteries and cut the grass before knocking off for the day. With any luck he’d be on the lake in his bass boat by noon, along with a cold six-pack and a container of minnows from Buzzy’s. Perhaps he’d get Gordon Buzzy to sell him a bottle of Old Rocking Chair. He bit into the egg salad sandwich his wife had made for him.
Chewing egg salad on white bread liberally smeared with mayonnaise he looked at the mausoleum and snorted in contempt. The damn thing probably cost more than his house. Rich people, he thought resentfully. At least rich people died, just like everybody else. Blanton Trapnell wouldn’t be driving his Rolls-Royce through town anymore, not deigning to wave at Pewee when Peewee drove past going the other way in his truck.
Peewee always waved when he encountered other drivers. It was the neighborly thing to do, but Blanton Trapnell thought he was too good to acknowledge people like Peewee who weren’t born with a silver spoon in their mouth. Blanton Trapnell wasn’t neighborly. Now he was dead and good riddance. Let’s see what Saint Peter would have to say about his lack of neighborliness when he showed up at the Pearly Gates. Peewee bit into the dill pickle his wife had packed along with the sandwich. Pickle juice ran down through the beard stubble on his chin as he smiled, thinking of Old Man Trapnell being denied admission to Heaven and instead being cast, shrieking, into a lake of fire.
He crumpled the pieces of wax paper the sandwich and the pickle had been wrapped in and stuck them in the hip pocket of his green Carhartt work pants. Then he took the key hanging from a cardboard tag marked ‘Trapnell’ that Chapman had given him and went to unlock the door.
Leaving the bronze door open to let it air out inside, Peewee got a push broom and a pry bar out of the truck. He carried them into the cool interior of the mausoleum and sniffed cautiously. It smelled musty, like closed-up spaces always did. He also detected the unmistakable stink of decomposition.
The decomp odor wasn’t coming from any of the corpses in the crypts. Those were embalmed and would be as dry as old leather. It was something freshly dead, most likely a possum or a raccoon that had crawled through the ventilation shaft on the roof. Pewee figured he’d find whatever it was lying in the shadows, paws-up. He drew on a pair of rubber work gloves and patted the black plastic trash bag tucked in his belt. Ms. Possum or Mr. Raccoon would be going into the bag. He just hoped they weren’t too gooshy.
A stained glass window in the rear wall threw splashes of red, blue and green over the stone floor. The window’s subject was utterly inexplicable to Peewee: not Jesus or some saint but three naked men being attacked by huge snakes. Peewee stared at it, trying to recall which Bible story it could have come from. There were several involving animals. There was Daniel in the lions’ den, and Jonah and the whale, and one about a talking donkey that got pissed off when its owner kept hitting it with a stick, but he couldn’t think of anything involving snakes, other than the Garden of Eden thing.
“Rich people,” he muttered shaking his head.
He leaned the broom against the wall inside the door. He’d sweep the floor before he locked up.
The double crypt where Blanton Trapnell’s coffin would go was on the left wall, down near the snake window. Trapnell’s second wife was in there and he would be going in beside her. The late Mrs. Trapnell had been a terror. Peewee wouldn’t want to wait for the last trumpet to blow while lying beside a bitch like Deirdre Trapnell. Fortunately he wouldn’t have to. He’d be buried out at Holy Redeemer with his wife and his mama and daddy and the rest of his family. The Trapnells could keep their old mausoleum with its bizarre naked-men-and-snakes window, thank you very much.
Pewee intended to use the pry bar to remove the granite slab known in the funeral trade as a shutter from the front of the double crypt. The shutter was inscribed with Blanton’s name and date of birth, as well as his wife’s name and her dates of birth and death. A stonecutter would add Blanton’s final date and it would go back in place and be sealed, after his bronze casket went in.
The casket was a model called the Chancellor made by the Batesville Casket Company. It cost $25,000. It had a variety of high-end features, including a rounded glass seal, bronze swing-bar handles, fully adjustable inner bed with head and foot velvet pillows and matching velvet blanket and a hidden locking mechanism.
Blanton’s purchase of the most expensive casket among those on display in Chapman’s showroom had been a red letter day for Lycott and Joelle Chapman and their two children. The family celebrated by taking a trip to Jekyll Island, where they’d gone to a water park.
Peewee walked down the center aisle, pausing to kick at a drift of leaves that must have blown in under the door. As he kicked at the leaves, scattering them, his work boot came in contact with something unyielding. He looked down to see what it was and found it was a foot, clad in a narrow, polished black shoe.
The pry bar hit the stone floor with a clatter as Peewee turned tail and ran.
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Jill Hand is a member of International Thriller Writers. Her Southern Gothic novels, White Oaks, and Black Willows, are available on Amazon and from the publisher, Black Rose Writing.
Advance readers called White Oaks a fast-paced, hilarious account of three siblings who are competing for their father’s forty-billion-dollar fortune while trying to prevent the destruction of Planet Earth.
Diane Donovan, senior reviewer from Midwest Book Review praised White Oaks, calling it, “an unusually multifaceted tale that holds the ability to prompt laughter from thriller-style tension.”
A sequel to White Oaks, Black Willows, follows the adventures of the squabbling, dysfunctional Trapnell family. Red Pines, third in the series of Trapnell family thrillers, was just released in April 2024.
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Along with Jessica Fletcher, Terrie Farley Moran co-writes the Murder She Wrote mystery series including Murder, She Wrote: Killer on the Court. She is the author of the Read ‘Em and Eat cozy mystery series and also co-writes the Scrapbooking Mysteries with Laura Childs. Recipient of both the Agatha and the Derringer Awards, Moran has published numerous mystery short stories. The only thing Terrie enjoys more than wrangling mystery plots into submission is hanging out with any or all of her seven grandchildren.
