The Pot Thief Who Studied Billy the Kid (48 page)

I turned to see Wiley trotting towards me, my hat hanging from his mouth. He stopped about twenty feet from me and dropped it. Then he stared at me for a few seconds and trotted away.
I remembered Julie the vet telling me that
dogs have a nesting instinct
and
like to take soft personal
items
from their owners
as
a show of affection
. Maybe he
had
seen me as a helper. Mayb
e he
did
dig that water for us.
Maybe that
was
a smile on his face.
Probably not, but I liked the idea.

I turned back around.

“You’re crying,
”
she said.

“Tears of joy
,” I said. “
Let’s go home.”

The Pot Thief Books

The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras
             
2009

Winner (Kindle version), “Eppie” as best e-book mystery of the year

Winner, New Mexico Book of the Year, Mystery

When a stranger enters Hubie’s shop and hands him a picture of a thousand-year-old pot, Hubie tells him he can see the real thing at the Valle del Rio Museum at the University of New Mexico. “I’ve already seen it,” says the stranger. “What I want to do is buy it.”

“Well, you could make them an offer I suppose,” says Hubie, “but I don’t think it’s for sale.”

The stranger replies, “Museums seldom sell things from their collections. But you’re in the business of selling pots, so perhaps I can buy it from you.”

“And if I owned it,” Hubie assures him with a smile, “I would sell it to you gladly.”

The man looks him straight in the eyes. “Perhaps you could acquire it.”

Hubie knows he should resist this attempt to suborn a felony, but the guy is offering twenty-five thousand dollars which Hubie sorely needs. He figures it can’t do any harm just to check it out the stranger’s odd request. His visit to the museum reminds him of why he isn’t really a thief at all (illegal pot digging being, in his view, a noble profession outlawed solely for reasons of political correctness). His cautious nature is challenged by alarms, guards and barred windows. But when he gets home, a Federal Agent is waiting and accuses him of stealing the pot.

Hubie grapples with the meaning of two missing pots, a charge of murder, an unidentified corpse and a tricky theft.

The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy
             
2010

Winner (Kindle version)
“Eppie” as best e-book mystery of the year

First series ever to win two “Eppies” in a row

In the second book in the series, Hubert Schuze' larceny is for a good cause. He wants to recover sacred pots stolen from San Roque, a mysterious New Mexico pueblo closed to outsiders. An easy task for Hubert Schuze, pot digger. Except these pots are not under the ground – they're 150 feet above it in the apartment of the retired head of the University of New Mexico anthropology program, the very man who expelled him from school. The Department Head clain themed to be repatriating the pots to the San Roque, but another retired professor suspects otherwise. A visit to San Roque inspires Hubie to find and return the pots.  Hubie's intuitive deductive skills lead to a perfect plan which is thwarted when he encounters the beautiful Stella and he is arrested for murder. Things don’t look good—he was in the room where the body was found, everyone heard the shot, and he came out with blood on his hands. Hubie struggles to stay one step ahead of building security, one step behind Stella, and one step away from a long fall down a garbage chute. During his repeated ineffectual attempts to break into the apartment where the cache of sacred pots resides, Hubie is guided by Ptolemy's wisdom. What better place than the ebony New Mexico desert sky to demonstrate the optical illusion of retrograde motion, like a circle in a spiral?

The Pot Thief Who Studied Einstein
             
2011

Winner of the prestigious “Lefty Award” for

Best Humorous Mystery of the Year.

The third book in the series opens with Hubie riding blindfolded to the house of a reclusive collector of Anasazi pottery who wants an appraisal of his collection and insists on the blindfold to keep secret the location of the valuable cache. During the appraisal, Hubie discovers three of the pots are not genuine. He should know—they are copies he himself made. After Hubie completes his appraisal, the collector pays his fee by placing twenty-five crisp hundred dollar bills into Hubie’s shirt pocket. The blindfold is reapplied and Hubie is driven home only to discover after the driver has left him off that the fee is no longer in his pocket. He can’t return to the house with the collection because he doesn’t know its location, but he does remember Segundo Cantú, the person who commissioned him to make the copies. Hubie figures Cantú is the real owner of the pots, and the guy at the appraisal must have been an associate sent by Cantú who wanted to avoid answering questions Hubie would inevitably ask.

At least Hubie does have Cantú’s address, and Susannah suggests they recreate the blindfolded ride. She drives him from his pottery shop to Cantú’s address. The distance and number of turns seem about right so far as Hubie can recall, but of course he can’t be certain, so he embarks on an abortive attempt to stake out the house, reading a book about Einstein to pass the time.  He eventually decides the house is empty and works up the nerve to commit a B & E. He is pleased to discover that the house looks exactly like the one that held the collection. He is less pleased to discover that the house is empty except for an old Cadillac convertible in the garage.  Susannah hotwires the car, leaving a note advising Cantú to place an ad in the personals in order to get his car back.

Whit Fletcher of the Albuquerque PD asks Hubie to identify a body at the morgue. Notoriously squeamish, Hubie tries to wiggle ou0" t of the task, but when Whit starts asking about the Cadillac convertible, Hubie decides he’d better cooperate. Hubie tells Whit the truth — he can’t name the victim. But he does recognize him It’ the man who was with the collection when Hubie did the appraisal. 

Hubie is then the victim of a drive-by shooting, but he survives because the bullet hit the book on Einstein he was still struggling to complete and had stuck in the chest pocket of his coat. The bullet penetrated all the way to chapter 37, which, Hubie later observes, was a lot further than he had gotten in it.

Hubie’s almost monastic life is changed by two unexpected love interests— Dolly Madison Aguirre, the daughter of his former high school history teacher, and the exotic long-limbed Izuanita. Between juggling two romances, Hubie must discover the identity of the dead man and the whereabouts of Segundo Cantú, a task made surreal when the dead man also turns out to be named Segundo Cantú.

The Pot Thief Who Studied Escoffier
             
2011

Hubie agrees, against his better judgment, to create special plates for
Schnitzel
, an improbably-themed Austrian restaurant opening soon in Santa Fe. The fee was too enticing to pass up. The restaurateur insists the plates be made on-site in Santa Fe. Then, a member of the rogue’s gallery of cooks, potscrubbers, and waiters who will staff Schnitzel turns up dead in the back of Hubie’s Bronco, poisoned by barium carbonate, one of the chemicals Hubie is using in his glaze. Hubie dodges indictment, and the publicity of the death doesn’t diminish the crowd on opening night. The food does that.

The restaurant seems headed for an early demise when the staff hatches a bold – some might say loony – plan to save the day by transforming
Schnitzel
with an Austrian/Southwestern fusion menu. Hubie, the only one who knows anything about New Mexico cuisine, is tapped to create the menu and inspire the staff. It works, and crowds reappear. When Hubie is accused of siphoning off funds, he finally figures out why the restaurateur hired him. He also figures out who killed the cook and why. But the FBI agent embedded in the kitchen crew was ultimately his biggest surprise.

The Pot Thief Who Studied D. H. Lawrence
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2012

This book is an homage to Agatha Christie’s
Ten Little Indians
. Hubie – back in the good graces of his alma mater after being responsible for the creation of a large scholarship fund – is invited to give a lecture on ancient Native American pottery to an exclusive gathering of donors invited by the University of New Mexico to a weekend at the Lawrence Ranch north of Taos. He accepts the invitation because it will give him the run of the place where he hopes to find a pot inscribed and given to Lawrence by a famous Taos potter of the 1930s.

A freak late-season snowstorm strands them on the mountain. When one of the guests is found dead in the bathtub of his room with an electric shaver in his hand, opinion is divided as to whether it was an accident or suicide. But Hubie knows it had to be murder. Although the razor is plugged into a regular 120 volt socket, the device on the plug is a transformer, and the razor’s twelve volts couldn’t electrocute anyone. Furthermore, there had been no hot water that morning, and Hubie speculates that no one would choose a bath in icy water over a quick icy shower or even a sponge bath. All doubt is removed when a second victim freezes to death in a walk-in freezer. The guests take precautions against further deaths, but yet another person dies and one disappears, leaving Hubie to solve the mystery.

Praise for the Pot Thief Books

“Extraordinarily funny.”

—
Baltimore Sun

“J. Michael Orenduff knows how to hook the reader from the get-go.”

—
Albuquerque Journal

“Orenduff may fill Hillerman’s shoes.”

—
Gallup Herald

“Light, amusing banter reminiscent of Lawrence Block's Bernie Rhodenbarr series.”

—
Denver Post

“Orenduff perfectly captures the beauty of the New Mexican sunset, a good friend and a margarita. Throw in the occasional dead body, and it’s pure enchantment.”

—
El Paso Times

“Orenduff is a master of his craft. He pulls you in by a thread and masterfully winds the story around his characters. Prepare for a sleepless night. I couldn’t put it down.”

—Marie Romero Cash, author of
Tortilla Chronicles

“Fun, amusing mysteries that allow readers to enter into the world of art and philosophy, science and murder
…
Buy a Pot Thief murder mystery, grab a margarita, and read up!”

—
Mirage
, the University of New Mexico Alumni magazine

“Mike Orenduff's
 
mysteries are
 
intelligent, clever, and
 
downright funny, with
 
a spicy
 
Old Town Albuquerque setting and plots as
 
pungent and twisted
 
as a
 
chile ristra.
 
I'm in love with Hubie Schuze—pot thie
f, shopkeeper,
 
reluctant sleuth
and cook extraordinaire. A winning series!”