What's New with William Rawlings...
The Garden of Earthly Delights
The Garden of Earthly Delights
The Garden of Earthly Delights
The Garden of Earthly Delights, is now available on Amazon.com and should soon be in book stores. It is--I think--one of my better pieces of writing. It will be released during the summer of 2024.
In this, the third book in the John Wesley O’Toole mystery series, he has made the decision to ask his girlfriend Jenna to marry him, an e
The Garden of Earthly Delights, is now available on Amazon.com and should soon be in book stores. It is--I think--one of my better pieces of writing. It will be released during the summer of 2024.
In this, the third book in the John Wesley O’Toole mystery series, he has made the decision to ask his girlfriend Jenna to marry him, an effort to return both of their mixed-up lives to some sense of normalcy. They find themselves in Madrid, Spain, where O’Toole is attending an art exhibition. He plans to ask for Jenna’s hand in the Prado Museum, standing in front of the magnificent painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights. But Jenna, on seeing it, becomes emotional, in the process revealing more of her checkered past as a stripper and former drug addict. Importantly, she begins to speak of Mindy, her best friend who disappeared years earlier. When Mindy’s remains are recovered from a shallow grave, it becomes evident that O’Toole’s wish for a happy marriage will never happen unless the truth of Mindy’s death is revealed. It’s a wild plot, full of totally unexpected twists and turns!
Crypto
The Garden of Earthly Delights
The Garden of Earthly Delights
My latest book, Crypto, recipient of a 2024 Georgia Author of the Year Award, is the second in the John Wesley O'Toole mystery/suspense series. The protagonist, O'Toole, was introduced in The Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes, a novel that takes place in Savannah. Although I have been writing nonfiction--true crime most recently--I have
My latest book, Crypto, recipient of a 2024 Georgia Author of the Year Award, is the second in the John Wesley O'Toole mystery/suspense series. The protagonist, O'Toole, was introduced in The Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes, a novel that takes place in Savannah. Although I have been writing nonfiction--true crime most recently--I have had numerous readers request another mystery novel, especially one starring the O'Toole character. He is a disbarred former attorney turned art dealer, a good guy with good intentions who just seems to get into trouble.
The book opens as Don Moule, a multimillionaire cryptocurrency trader, shows up at O'Toole's gallery interested in purchasing investment-grade art. O'Toole, leery of what seems to be the perfect opportunity to solve his financial worries, investigates Moule and finds him to be legitimate and quite wealthy. But the would-be art purchaser has other connections that soon complicate matters and in the process put O'Toole in mortal danger. It's a fast-paced story that zigs and zags to another shocking ending.
The Columbus Stocking Strangler
The Garden of Earthly Delights
The Columbus Stocking Strangler
During an eight-month period in 1977 and 1978, the city of Columbus, Georgia, was terrorized by a mysterious serial killer who raped and ritualistically strangled seven elderly women in one of the community’s finer neighborhoods. Despite intensive efforts on the part of police the Stocking Strangler, as he came to be known, managed t
During an eight-month period in 1977 and 1978, the city of Columbus, Georgia, was terrorized by a mysterious serial killer who raped and ritualistically strangled seven elderly women in one of the community’s finer neighborhoods. Despite intensive efforts on the part of police the Stocking Strangler, as he came to be known, managed to elude capture. After the last murder in April 1978, the case went cold.
In the spring of 1984, a series of fortuitous events connected to an unrelated murder and a stolen pistol led to the capture of Carlton Gary, who had recently escaped from a South Carolina prison. Following a dramatic trial in August 1986, Gary was convicted of three of the seven Columbus murders and sentenced to death, a penalty that would not be carried out until March 2018.
This convoluted tale of crime and punishment is punctuated by dramatic and unexpected twists and turns including issues of race, alleged conspiracy and misconduct on the part of the police and the judiciary, a second serial killer active in Columbus during the time of the Strangler murders, the Ku Klux Klan, errors in DNA analysis, and a vigorous and prolonged struggle by attorneys and death penalty opponents who believed in Gary’s innocence.
The Columbus Stocking Strangler is also available in Audiobook Editions. Downloads are available from multiple sources.
MORE RECENT BOOKS: LIGHTHOUSES, MYSTERY AND MURDER
Lighthouses of the Georgia Coast
The Strange Journey of the Confederate Constitution
Lighthouses of the Georgia Coast
Once an essential part of nautical navigation and commerce, the world's lighthouses have become historical relics of days past, their primary function now replaced by modern technology. Yet these magnificent structures continue to fascinate us, not only for their intrinsic beauty, but also as monuments to our shared history, and as symbols of hope and salvation to those cast adrift on the stormy seas of life. From the mid-eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, the waterways of coastal Georgia from the St. Marys River in the south to the Savannah River in the north were an integral part of the state's economy. Georgia's barrier islands are today the site of five existing lighthouses, each with its own unique style, history, and role in events over the past decades and centuries. Richly illustrated with both contemporary and historical photos.
Six Inches Deeper
The Strange Journey of the Confederate Constitution
Lighthouses of the Georgia Coast
On August 31, 1972, Hellen Hanks, a pretty thirty-four-year-old mother of three disappeared. After a brief investigation by local and state authorities, the case went cold. In the fall of 1980, a farmer clearing a field south of town discovered a buried object, a box containing the dismembered remains of the missing woman. The true story of this horrific murder has all the elements of a work of suspense fiction: money, power, sex, race, and the haves vs. the have-nots. The outcome would have been totally different if the box had been buried only six inches deeper.
The Strange Journey of the Confederate Constitution
The Strange Journey of the Confederate Constitution
The Strange Journey of the Confederate Constitution
The Strange Journey Of The Confederate Constitution is a collection of seventeen articles and essays on topics in Georgia and Southern history. Individual chapters are arranged by era and cover subjects ranging from The Great Yazoo Fraud of the 1790s, to Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Treasure of the 1860s, to the Reign of Terror visited by the Ku Klux Klan in Macon of the 1920s. While academic, the book's varying topics are aimed at readers with a general interest in the intriguing and often convoluted history of the South. Some articles focus on events, others on people (e.g. Gutzon Borglum or Eli Whitney), and still others on more controversial topics, such as the place of The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind in modern society. The author's writing style is one that promotes relaxed recreational reading, treating each topic as an unfolding story as the chapter progresses. As a bonus to those interested in research and writing about historical subjects, the Appendix contains advice in the form of "A Short Practical Guide to Historical Research for Writers."
Girl with the Kaleidoscope Eyes
Girl with the Kaleidoscope Eyes
The Strange Journey of the Confederate Constitution
John Wesley O'Toole, a disbarred former attorney, is trying to make a new start in life as an art dealer in Savannah, Georgia, after his release from prison. He is struggling financially when he is approached by a prominent wealthy businessman and offered a significant sum to help recover a painting that's been stolen by the man's estranged granddaughter, Lucy. It's an offer O'Toole can't afford to refuse, and seemingly his one chance to avoid losing everything he's worked for. With the help of Jenna, O'Toole's friend and sometimes lover, he sets out to find the missing painting, and with it, the missing granddaughter.
When Lucy's body is discovered at the site of a planned meeting between the two, O'Toole is arrested and charged with kidnapping and murder. Thrown into the county jail and unable to afford an attorney, he's assigned a public defender who urges him to plead guilty, based on what appears to be overwhelming evidence against him. When a new attorney gains his freedom on bail, both he and O'Toole become targets for someone who wants them dead. It soon becomes evident that what appeared to be real was false, and that O'Toole can trust no one but himself.
Set in historic Savannah, the tale twists and turns to arrive at an unexpected and shocking ending.
The Mile High Club
Girl with the Kaleidoscope Eyes
The Rutherford Cipher
When the naked body of a former girlfriend is discovered in the forest miles from the nearest road, no one can figure how she got there—until the discovery of a plane crash some thirty miles away containing her ID and a naked male body…. In a fast moving tale involving corporate greed, cutting edge research in biofuels, private jets and small town politics, plus the mysterious death of a seeming innocent woman, Matt is drawn deeper into a web of deception that eventually threatens his very existence.
The Rutherford Cipher
Girl with the Kaleidoscope Eyes
The Rutherford Cipher
The Civil War brought death and ruin to the Old South, but out of the ashes there arose a remarkable legend that has intrigued treasure hunters and conspiracy buffs ever since - the "lost Confederate gold," said to have been buried somewhere in the swampy flatlands of Georgia following the fall of the Confederate government in 1865.
Now an out-of-work former dot-com executive has his hands on a set of old clues that might lead him to the fabled treasure - if only he can stay alive long enough to find it.
When Matt Rutherford's Silicon Valley dot-com firm goes belly-up, the displaced executive has nowhere else to go but home - home to Walkerville, Georgia, where, following the brutal death of his first cousin, he's been named sole heir to his elderly aunt's estate. While searching to clear his name as a suspect for his cousin's death, Matt uncovers a long-hidden family secret: he's descended from the same Southern officer assigned to guard the gold reserves following the fall of the Confederate capital in the waning days of the Civil War. Even more astonishing, he finds an old diary that reveals, through complex coded instructions, where the gold is buried.
Problem is, others know about the gold - and the old diary. They will stop at nothing to claim the treasure for themselves, even if it means murder.
Enlisting the help of Lisa Li, a beautiful Chinese-American computer expert, Matt sets out to unravel the mysterious clues - clues that eventually lead him to a top-secret nuclear weapons installation in South Carolina where he must evade a bloodthirsty killer as well as heavily-armed government agents before learning the horrifying truth behind the lost Confederate gold.