Murder At Merlefest

Experience the Ultimate Festival Nightmare

The music is loud. The crowds are wild. And the bodies are piling up.

Welcome to MerleFest, Wilkesboro's massive four-day traditional music festival that draws 80,000 rabid fans from around the globe. For Joe Johnson, the town's newly relocated head of campus security, taking this gig felt like entering paradise. He thought he was leaving behind the grim nightmares of big-city gang violence for a peaceful routine of lost kids and minor drunk-and-disorderlies.

He couldn't have been more wrong.

Before the gates even open on Day One, a gruesome discovery shatters the festival's harmony: a lone, severed foot stuffed inside a high-powered trash compactor. The local rumor mill spins into overdrive, and all signs point to the foot belonging to the town's fiercely disliked and suddenly missing mayor, Burl Inche.

As Joe scrambles to handle a crime scene in the middle of a logistical zoo, he pairs up with DeeAnna Miles-a fiercely sharp, true-crime-addicted single mom and college coordinator who knows the local players and refuses to be fazed by anything the human body can ooze.

Together, they are plunged into a rapidly escalating circus of the macabre:

• The Calling Cards: Twelve angry skunks ruin a presidential photo op, and a dozen snakes invade a campus building.

• The Shadow Committee: Rumors swirl of a dark alliance skimming millions tax-free from the festival's scholarship funds.

• A Twisted Retribution: Soon, human flesh begins emerging from household plumbing, and a severed head is delivered right to the desk of the corrupt college president.