THE BELLE RIDGE MURDERS

About the Book

Vigilante or psychopath, who is murdering men in Belle Ridge? Lita Anders, a New York journalist, leaves Manhattan with her five year old daughter and returns to her hometown, an old New Jersey suburb forty minutes from Manhattan, where mansions meet Greenwich Village.

Impressed with her credentials as well as her legs, the playboy publisher of the Belle Ridge Call dispatches Lita to cover the murder of an Orthodox rabbi killed on the steps of his vandalized synagogue. Her investigation catapults her into the murders of three other local men, an alcoholic truck driver, a gay actor and a prominent attorney. The only link between the victims is the missing weapon, a Smith and Wesson 38.

Her initial lead points her to a gang of neo-Nazi college thugs, the likely synagogue vandals, but she senses that there is more to the string of murders than bigotry run amok. Each of the victims was married and not one of the widows is grieving; not the Orthodox intellectual, not the cocktail waitress, not the famous actress, not the reclusive socialite.

When Lita discovers that four years earlier a City Building Department Engineer was murdered, the case unsolved and the gun, a Smith and Wesson 38, still missing, she slams up against the ambitions of a corrupt Belle Ridge developer. Suddenly, lethal accidents dodge her steps, but the link between the five murders continues to elude her.

About the Author

Carole B. Ravin, a retired attorney, is married and has grown children. She has lived in New Jersey, for most of her life but splits her time between New Jersey and her Vermont home. The setting of the Belle Ridge Murders is a fictional composite of New Jersey suburban communities that the author knows well.