The Cantaloupe Thief
The decade-old death of matriarch Alberta Grambling Resnick is the only unsolved murder in Grambling, Georgia. With the passage of time, townspeople assumed the deed had been committed by a transient with no real motive or ties to the community. Newspaper reporter Branigan Powers wants to explore that theory by investigating among the town’s homeless population. Even she thinks it’s a long shot – until homeless people start dying.
As the action careens from northeast Georgia to the Carolina coast, from posh homes to hidden encampments, Branigan is racked by fear that she has awakened a murderer. Desperate, she seeks help from Malachi Ezekiel Martin, a homeless veteran who glides unseen through the town. But can she trust him?
The Cantaloupe Thief is a murder mystery but not like one you’ve read before. It asks what happens when people are invisible. What impact does that have on the rest of us?
About Deb Richardson-Moore (Greenville, South Carolina Author)
Deb Richardson-Moore is a former writer for The Greenville News and current pastor of Triune Mercy Center, a non-denominational church that includes Greenville's homeless residents in a worshiping community. She is author of a memoir, The Weight of Mercy, about her first three years as a pastor, and two novels, The Cantaloupe Thief and The Cover Story. All were published by Lion Hudson of Oxford, England.
The Weight of Mercy was on the 2016 reading list of United Methodist Women.
The Cantaloupe Thief, the first in the Branigan Powers mystery series, was published in 2016, and uses a homeless encampment as a partial setting. It was an Okra Pick of the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance as a book that sellers liked to recommend.The second Branigan Powers mystery, The Cover Story, was released in 2017.
Deb is a Greenville native and a graduate of Wade Hampton High School, Wake Forest University (Winston-Salem, NC) and Erskine Theological Seminary (Due West, SC).
She is married to Vince Moore, who is director of media relations for Furman University. They have three grown children – Dustin, Taylor and Madison.
