It was very big news.

And it wasn’t until I was amidst my copyedits that I realized how much Mr. Taber’s murder had influenced my thinking about policing and murder investigations in small towns.

I’m from a small town. East Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Population: almost 11,000 when I last lived there. That was 1993, the year I graduated high school. A half-year earlier Kent “Rusty” Taber Jr. was stabbed to death in my small town. He lived in an apartment over the funeral home where he worked part-time as an embalmer.People weren’t stabbed to death in my small town. And the funeral home detail? Made it even spookier. Twenty years after that brutal killing, I wrote my first mystery novel,