The morning after ...

Are we all bleary-eyed and

election-weary? I suspect so, although I'm writing this column a full

day before the vote counting begins.

And, with the total blindness

of foresight, I'm predicting that a fresh Republican wind will be blowing

through Washington in the coming weeks. Note to prosecutors: Confiscate

all those Clinton administration hard drives before they all suffer inexplicable

erasures.

What a strange election

year locally: In one local school board race, a Democrat ran as a Republican

and a Republican ran on the Democratic ticket.

Peachtree City voters are looking

forward to next year's mayor and council races to let the incumbents know

what most in the city think about their Wal-Mart, Home Depot and West

Village decisions.

State politics are upside down.

A Democratic governor embraces many GOP positions on school reform, gets

it enacted by a Democrat-controlled legislature, enrages the educrats

and teachers' lobby and shakes up the status quo. Meanwhile, a Republican

state school superintendent stumps the state sounding all the world like

a teachers' union and NEA advocate. Strange times.

Need some relief from

the political circuses? How about a good murder mystery or eight of them,

to be precise?

"Murder in the Peach State"

is the second true-crime book from Major Bruce Jordan, longtime chief

investigator for the Fayette County Sheriff's Department, and it will

grab and keep your attention if you'll give it a chance.

Jordan will be signing his

book this Friday night at the local Barnes and Noble and at several area

bookstores over the next few weeks.

Each of the eight chapters

covers a homicide investigation, beginning with Atlanta's notorious 1913

Mary Phagan-Leo Frank case and concluding with 1991's grisly headless,

handless body discovery in neighboring Spalding County.

Jordan's successful first

book (with more than 10,000 sold) focused on Fayette County's big murder

cases, while his second encompasses solved crimes ranging from northeast

Georgia's Jackson County to southwest Georgia's Muscogee County. In between,

Jordan documents some hair-raising encounters with evil and some solid

detective work.

I should emphasize that "solved"

means that someone was tried and convicted for the crimes, although in

at least one case, the trained investigator turned author asserts an innocent

man was wrongly convicted, leading to a heinous lynching, a continuing

blot on the state's reputation.

One of the most horrifying

chapters details how a Jasper County farmer kept slaves in 1921! and,

when he thought federal agents were closing in on him, methodically murdered

15 black men, 11 of them within a two-week span.

Perhaps the most suspenseful

as well as the most meticulously documented story is that of the Columbus

Strangler, who terrorized women in the Chattahoochee River city during

the 1970s and '80s. Jordan's account is first-rate reportage, reminiscent

of that granddaddy of all true-crime books, Truman Capote's "In Cold

Blood."

The sense of dread and overarching

fear that gripped Columbus is vivid and palpable in Jordan's story. A

few minutes into reading this chapter, you want to get up and check the

lock on your back door.

I have some quibbles with the

book. I confess I wanted more of the confident storytelling I saw in the

Strangler chapter. I could have skipped the lackluster tales of the poisonous

Macon widow and the bizarre redneck murder on Spalding's Troublesome Creek.

But these are quibbles. Jordan

excels in setting the scene and giving perspective on both the times and

the people associated with some of the state's most infamous crimes. He's

especially good at the telling details, the little things that give substance

to a good story. I suspect this volume will show up gift-wrapped under

more than a few Christmas trees this holiday season. Meanwhile, I'm looking

forward to his next effort.