Highlights this spring include major books from a number of bestselling thriller authors, as well as some exciting debuts.

Steve Berry, a founding member of the International Thriller Writers, has moved to Minotaur, publisher of his 10th novel featuring former U.S. Justice Department agent Cotton Malone, The Patriot Threat. This entry has an announced first printing of 400,000, and Berry will promote with a 14-city national author tour.

Joseph Finder, another veteran of the bestseller lists, follows 2014’s Suspicion with another breakneck thriller stand-alone, The Fixer. Dutton is planning a 100,000-copy first printing and a five-city author tour.

A bestselling mystery author is the hero of Joyce Carol Oates’s tale of suspense, Jack of Spades. “This is Joyce Carol Oates at her most diabolical—no small statement,” says Otto Penzler, the head of Mysterious Press.

Richard Price, writing as Harry Brandt, delivers The Whites, about a New York City cop seeking his equivalent of Captain Ahab’s white whale. “The Whites is the crime novel of the year—impossible to put down,” says Stephen King.

One of the most anticipated spy thrillers of the year is Jason Matthews’s Palace of Treason, the sequel to 2013’s Red Sparrow, which won both Edgar and Thriller awards for best first novel. Another highly anticipated second novel is The Fifth Gospel by Ian Caldwell, coauthor of The Rule of Four. David Baldacci calls this religious thriller “erudite and a page-turner, literary but compulsively readable.”

According to Harlequin executive v-p Loriana Sacilotto, British author Graeme Cameron’s debut serial-killer novel, Normal, is a “smart, witty and uniquely gripping read that takes us into the mind of a killer and, against all expectations and moral compasses, makes us root for him.”

Two first novels involve harrowing journeys: K.T. Medina’s White Crocodile, in which a woman travels to the killing fields of Cambodia, where her ex-husband has just died (“a huge new talent,” says Mo Hayder); and Jax Miller’s Freedom’s Child, in which a woman convicted of killing her husband goes looking for the daughter she gave up for adoption years before (“a powerful new voice,” says Karin Slaughter).

Finally, from the late Heda Margolius Kovály, author of the Holocaust memoir Under a Cruel Star, comes Innocence: Or, Murder on Steep Street, a rediscovered gem of Czech literature that depicts early 1950s Prague under Communist rule.

PW’s Top 10: Mysteries & Thrillers

The Fifth Gospel. Ian Caldwell. Simon & Schuster, Mar. 3

The Fixer. Joseph Finder. Dutton, June 9

Freedom’s Child. Jax Miller. Crown, June 2

Innocence: Or, Murder on Steep Street. Heda Margolius Kovály. Soho Crime, June 2

Jack of Spades. Joyce Carol Oates. Mysterious, May 5

Normal. Graeme Cameron. Mira, Mar. 31

Palace of Treason. Jason Matthews. Scribner, May 5

The Patriot Threat. Steve Berry. Minotaur, Mar. 31

White Crocodile. K.T. Medina. Little, Brown/Mulholland, June 30

The Whites. Richard Price, writing as Harry Brandt. Holt, Feb. 17

Mysteries & Thrillers Listings

Amazon/Thomas & Mercer

Shady Cross by James Hankins (Feb. 24, paper, $14.95, ISBN 978-1-4778-2098-8). Two-bit crook Stokes ransacks a wrecked car off an Indiana country road and discovers that the dead driver had a knapsack stuffed with $350,000. The bad news is that Stokes also finds a ringing cellphone that announces the money was ransom for the dead man’s little daughter.

Atlantic Monthly

Falling in Love by Donna Leon (Apr. 7, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0-8021-2353-4). In Commissario Guido Brunetti’s 24th mystery, the Italian policeman reunites with opera diva Flavia Petrelli, whom he exonerated of murder in his first outing, Death at La Fenice.

Atria

The Well by Catherine Chanter (May 19, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-1-4767-9951-3). In British author Chanter’s first novel, Ruth Ardingly, who’s been released from prison to serve out her sentence for arson and suspected murder in house arrest, drives with her husband to a farm called the Well. On their arrival, it starts to rain, but only on the Well, nowhere else in the drought-stricken region.

Ballantine

Someone Is Watching by Joy Fielding (Apr. 8, hardcover, $27, ISBN 978-0-553-39063-6). Deeply shaken after a brutal attack, Miami PI Bailey Carpenter struggles to regain control over what had once seemed a neatly ordered life. Bailey replays the assault in her mind, searching for a detail that will help the police catch the unidentified culprit.

Bantam

Dreaming Spies: A Novel of Suspense Featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes by Laurie R. King (Feb. 17, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0-345-53179-7). Detectives Holmes and Russell find themselves navigating the beautiful but dangerous imperial corridors of a politically unstable Japan—and facing an old acquaintance in Oxford whose peculiar skills might prove more than a match for their own.

Berkley Prime Crime

Bittersweet by Susan Wittig Albert (Apr. 7, hardcover, $25.95, ISBN 978-0-425-25562-9). The 23rd China Bayles mystery finds the herbalist and former lawyer teaming with an old friend to solve a complex case of theft and murder in a South Texas ranching community.

Bitter Lemon

(dist. by Consortium)

Tin Sky by Ben Pastor (June 2, paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-1-908524-51-5). Having barely escaped the inferno of Stalingrad, Maj. Martin Bora is still serving on the Russian front as a German counterintelligence officer. When two Russian generals in his custody die within 24 hours of each other, everything appears to exclude the likelihood of foul play.

Bloomsbury

Sidney Chambers and the Forgiveness of Sins by James Runcie (May 19, paper, $18, ISBN 978-1-63286-103-0). In the six stories in the fourth Grantchester Mysteries collection, full-time priest and part-time detective Canon Sidney Chambers continues his sleuthing adventures in 1960s Cambridge, England. A six-part series for PBS, Grantchester, is releasing this winter.

Counterpoint

(dist. by PGW)

The Joy of Killing by Harry N. Maclean (July 14, hardcover, $25, ISBN 978-1-61902-536-3). True-crime author Maclean makes his fiction debut with a philosophical thriller. A college professor, who recently published a novel in which he justified a gruesome murder, returns to his childhood lake house in Minnesota. There he sorts through the multitude of secrets and acts of violence that make up his past.

Crown

Freedom’s Child by Jax Miller (June 2, hardcover, $25, ISBN 978-0-8041-8680-3). Freedom Oliver, who was arrested for killing her husband 20 years earlier and is now in a witness protection program in a small Oregon town, heads to Kentucky to find her missing daughter, a possible kidnap victim, whom she gave up for adoption.

Dutton

The Fixer by Joseph Finder (June 9, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-525-95461-3). When Rick Hoffman loses his job and apartment, his only option is to move back into—and renovate—the home of his miserable youth, now empty and in decay since his father’s stroke. But when he starts to pull it apart, he makes an electrifying discovery that will put his life in peril.

ECW

(dist. by IPG)

Sing a Worried Song by William Deverell (Apr. 14, hardcover, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-77041-245-3). In the sixth Arthur Beauchamp novel, the Canadian defense lawyer, in a moment of career restlessness, decides to switch sides, just once, and prosecute a young man charged with murdering a clown.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Sarah Chrichton

Hell’s Gate by Richard Crompton (June 2, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0-374-70926-6). In the second Mollel whodunit, the Nairobi police detective gets transferred to a remote small town. When the body of a flower worker turns up in the local lake, Mollel wonders if his unfriendly new colleagues, whom he suspects of bribery and extortion, are involved in something more sinister.

Five Star Publishing

Murder in Ely: A Third-Culture Kid Mystery by D.-L. Nelson (May 6, hardcover, $25.95, ISBN 978-1-4328-3043-4). In the sixth of the series, Annie Young is in Ely, England, where she’s visiting with old friends Janet and Rod MacKenzie, when her new husband, police chief Roger Perret, has a heart attack. After the murder of another friend, the principal suspect disappears.

Forge

A Scourge of Vipers by Bruce DeSilva (Apr. 7, hardcover, $25.99, ISBN 978-0-7653-7431-8). To solve Rhode Island’s budget crisis, the governor wants to legalize sports gambling, but organized crime and others have a lot to lose if the legislation passes. Liam Mulligan, a reporter for the Providence Dispatch, investigates, in his fourth outing.

Grand Central

The Dead Lands by Benjamin Percy (Apr. 14, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-1-4555-2824-0). This postapocalyptic thriller reimagines the Lewis and Clark saga, after a super flu and nuclear fallout have made a husk of the world we know.

The President’s Shadow by Brad Meltzer (June 16, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-0-446-55393-3). Beecher White makes an alarming discovery on the White House grounds: a severed arm buried in the Rose Garden. As he investigates, he realizes it’s a message that may have dire repercussions for the U.S. president. Even worse, the message turns Beecher’s personal life upside down, pointing him toward the dark truth about his father’s death.

Grove/Atlantic/Mysterious

Jack of Spades by Joyce Carol Oates (May 5, hardcover, $24, ISBN 978-0-8021-2394-7). In this tale of suspense, Andrew Rush, a critically and commercially successful mystery novelist, has a secret: under a pseudonym he pens potboilers that are violent, lurid, even masochistic. Rush’s reputation, career, and family life are all at risk if his secret comes out.

The Ways of the World: A James Maxted Thriller by Robert Goddard (June 2, hardcover, $25, ISBN 978-0-8021-2359-6). This first in a new historical trilogy introduces James “Max” Maxted, a Royal Flying Corps veteran, whose father, Sir Henry, is a British delegate to the Paris peace conference in 1919. When Sir Henry dies under suspicious circumstances, Max investigates.

Harlequin/Mira

Normal by Graeme Cameron (Mar. 31, hardcover, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-7783-1850-7). In this first novel, a bumbling British serial killer initially slaughters his female victims without remorse. Then he has a baffling change of heart, and establishes nonpredatory relationships with three women, one of whom he falls in love with.

Harper

Pleasantville by Attica Locke (Apr. 15, hardcover, $26.99, ISBN 978-0-06-225940-0). On election eve 1996, a young black woman who was volunteering for a mayoral candidate goes missing from Pleasantville, a hamlet for upwardly mobile blacks on the north side of Houston. When an arrest is made in the case, attorney Jay Porter must navigate a maze of dark money and family secrets in his effort to achieve justice.

Harper/Bourbon Street

Down Don’t Bother Me by Jason Miller (Mar. 24, paper, $14.99, ISBN 978-0-06-236219-3). In the depths of the Knight Hawk, one of the last working coal mines in downstate Illinois, the body of a reporter is found, his mini-recorder tied around his neck and a notepad stuffed in his mouth. Knight Hawk’s owner isn’t happy—and wants answers.

Holt

The Whites by Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt (Feb. 17, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-0-8050-9399-5). Sgt. Billy Graves of the NYPD obsesses over his “White” (that’s what Billy calls the one who got away, à la Moby Dick): triple-murderer Curtis Taft. Taft is the elusive monster Billy is fated to hunt, probably even after retirement.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Ghost Fleet by P.W. Singer and August Cole (June 30, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-0-544-14284-8). The United States, China, and Russia eye each other across a 21st-century version of the Cold War, which suddenly heats up at sea, on land, in the air, in outer space, and in cyberspace.

Kensington

Double Fudge Brownie Murder by Joanne Fluke (Feb. 24, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0-7582-8040-4). In Fluke’s 18th Hannah Swenson mystery with recipes, the Lake Eden, Minn., baker becomes a suspect when she’s the first to arrive at a crime scene in a judge’s chambers. To prove her innocence, Hannah must identify who really murdered Judge Colfax.

Knopf

The Governor’s Wife by Michael Harvey (June 16, hardcover, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-307-95864-8). In the fifth Michael Kelly mystery, the Chicago PI goes looking for disgraced Illinois governor Ray Perry, who disappeared from a federal courthouse shortly after being sentenced to 38 years in prison on corruption charges. Perry’s wife claims she has no idea where he is.

Little, Brown/Mulholland

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons (Mar. 24, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-0-316-19882-0). In 1893, Sherlock Holmes and Henry James travel to America to investigate the mysterious death of Clover Adams, the wife of historian Henry Adams, eight years earlier. Holmes’s nemesis, Moriarty, may be lurking in the shadows.

White Crocodile by K.T. Medina (June 30, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0-316-37400-2). Tess Hardy thought she had put Luke, her violent ex-husband, firmly in her past. Then Luke calls her from Cambodia, where he’s working as a mine-clearer, and there’s something in his voice she’s never heard before: fear. Two weeks later, he’s dead.

Midnight Ink

Come to Harm by Catriona McPherson (May 8, paper, $14.99, ISBN 978-0-7387-4387-5). Keiko Nishisato is delighted to leave Tokyo for the University of Edinburgh to complete her psychology studies. But Keiko starts to worry when threatening notes surface in the flat she’s renting in a small town outside Edinburgh, and locals won’t talk about the young women who have disappeared.

Minotaur

All the Old Knives by Olen Steinhauer (Mar. 10, hardcover, $23.99, ISBN 978-1-250-04542-3). Henry Pelham has arrived from Europe for a quiet dinner at a Carmel, Calif., restaurant with his former lover and CIA colleague, Celia Favreau. What starts as an effort to wrap up a 2006 case involving a terrorist attack on the Vienna Airport turns into something much bigger.

Badlands by C.J. Box (July 28, hardcover, $26.99, ISBN 978-1-312-58321-7). The booming North Dakota oil fields form the background to this tale of a newly arrived sheriff who encounters the region’s increasing gang problems, and learns that a young boy has taken a package sought by some highly dangerous men.

The Patriot Threat by Steve Berry (Mar. 31, hardcover, $26.99, ISBN 978-0-312-61458-4). A plot to destabilize the U.S. economy using a little-known irregularity in how the income tax was established has the globe-trotting Cotton Malone, in his 10th outing, racing to recover a document from a deposed North Korean dictator out to regain power.

Morrow

The Bone Tree by Greg Iles (Apr. 21, hardcover, $27.99, ISBN 978-0-06-231111-5). In the second installment of the trilogy that began with 2014’s Natchez Burning, former prosecutor Penn Cage and his fiancée, reporter and publisher Caitlin Masters, deal with the aftermath of their near death at the hands of the leader of a vicious sect of the Mississippi KKK.

The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson (Feb. 3, hardcover, $25.99, ISBN 978-0-06-238410-2). Ted Severson, a wealthy Boston entrepreneur, meets a stranger, Lily Kintner, who’s an archivist at a college outside Boston, in a Heathrow airport lounge. After trading confidences, Lily agrees to help Ted murder his unfaithful wife once they return to the States.

Nal/Obsidian

Who Buries the Dead: A Sebastian St. Cyr Novel by C.S. Harris (Mar. 3, hardcover, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-451-41756-5). In this Regency historical, the 10th featuring Sebastian St. Cyr, the aristocratic sleuth investigates the murder of a man who collected the heads of notable historical figures—whose own severed head winds up perched on a London bridge.

Oceanview

(dist. by Midpoint)

The Replacements by David Putnam (Feb. 3, hardcover, $26.95, ISBN 978-1-60809-137-9). Bruno Johnson, a former L.A. sheriff’s department cop who has settled in Costa Rica with his wife and the eight abused children they rescued and took (illegally) from the U.S., returns to California to track down a kidnapper, Jonas Mabry, whose life he saved when Mabry was five years old.

Overlook

Head of State: A Political Entertainment by Andrew Marr (Feb. 5, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-4683-1056-6). In 2017, the U.K. anxiously awaits the results of a referendum to determine whether it leaves the European Union. The disclosure of a murderous conspiracy would all but cinch the vote for one side.

Pegasus Crime

(dist. by Norton)

The Language of the Dead by Stephen Kelly (Apr. 15, hardcover, $25, ISBN 978-1-60598-696-8). Det. Chief Insp. Thomas Lamb investigates the brutal killing of an old man, the subject of a demonic local legend, while the Battle of Britain rages in the skies above the English countryside. Lamb follows a twisted trail of evidence, including an emotionally disturbed boy’s cryptic drawings.

Werewolf Cop by Andrew Klavan (Mar. 10, hardcover, $25.95, ISBN 978-1-60598-698-2). Zach Adams, a Houston homicide detective known for his integrity under fire, pursues a European gangster who has taken over the American underworld. Along the way, Zach gets transformed into something horrible—and deadly.

Penguin

Thursday’s Children: A Frieda Klein Mystery by Nicci French (June 30, paper, $16, ISBN 978-0-14-312721-5). In her fourth outing, solitary London psychotherapist Frieda Klein faces her most personal case yet when a former classmate appears at her door, begging for her help. Maddie Capel’s teenage daughter, Becky, claims that she was raped in her own bed one night while her mother was downstairs.

Permanent

The Mysteries of Soldiers Grove by Paul Zimmer (Feb. 28, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-1-57962-388-3). Cyril Solverson, a Wisconsin nursing home resident obsessed with biographical trivia, woos a new resident, a sophisticated, French-born woman, while dealing with a menacing thug who once kidnapped him and stole his wallet before abandoning him in a snowstorm.

Poisoned Pen

Satan’s Lullaby: A Medieval Mystery by Priscilla Royal (Feb. 3, hardcover, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-4642-0354-1). In the 11th medieval whodunit featuring Prioress Eleanor, the imperious Fr. Etienne Davoir travels from France to inspect the operations of Eleanor’s Tyndal Priory in East Anglia. The night before Davoir’s arrival, a soldier escorting his party has his throat slit.

Prometheus Books/Seventh Street

See Also Murder: A Marjorie Trumaine Mystery by Larry D. Sweazy (May 5, paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-1-63388-006-1). In a North Dakota town in 1964, indexer Marjorie Trumaine is yanked out of her quiet, bookish routine when the sheriff asks her to help solve the grisly murders of a married couple in their bedroom. Two grown sons living in the house claim to have heard nothing.

Putnam

The Strangler Vine by M.J. Carter (Mar. 31, hardcover, $26.95, ISBN 978-0-399-17167-3). Biographer Carter makes her fiction debut with a thriller set in 1837 colonial India. William Avery, an officer of the Honorable East India Company in Calcutta, assists the Sherlock Holmes–like Jeremiah Blake, a former company officer now designated a special inquiry agent, in finding a missing author of popular romance fiction.

Putnam/Marian Wood

The Lady from Zagreb by Philip Kerr (Apr. 7, hardcover, $26.95, ISBN 978-0-399-16764-5). In the 10th WWII-era Bernie Gunther novel, Josef Goebbels orders the former Berlin cop to Croatia, in search of a German movie actress’s missing father, who turns out to be a vicious war criminal.

Quercus

Season of Fear by Brian Freeman (Mar. 3, hardcover, $26.95, ISBN 978-1-62365-407-8). An assassin fatally shoots Birch Fairmont, a congressional candidate from a newly formed third party, at a Florida political fund-raiser. Ten years later, Birch’s widow, who’s running for governor of Florida, worries she’ll be the killer’s next target.

Random/Hard Case Crime

Thieves Fall Out by Gore Vidal (Apr. 7, hardcover, $22.99, ISBN 978-1-78116-792-2). First published under a pseudonym in 1953, Vidal’s “long lost” crime novel tells the story of a man caught up in events bigger than he is, a down-on-his-luck American hired to smuggle an ancient relic out of Cairo at a time when revolution is brewing and heads are about to roll.

Random/Titan

Kill Me, Darling: A Mike Hammer Novel by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins (Mar. 24, hardcover, $22.99, ISBN 978-1-78329-138-0). PI Mike Hammer’s secretary and partner, Velda, has walked out on him without explanation, and Mike is just surfacing from a four-month bender. Then an old cop turns up murdered, an old cop who once worked with Velda on the NYPD Vice Squad.

Riverhead

Too Bad to Die by Francine Mathews (Mar. 3, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-59463-179-5). At the critical Tehran Conference in 1943, Ian Fleming, a Royal Navy intelligence officer and the future creator of James Bond, gets wind of a Nazi plot to assassinate Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin.

St. Martin’s

Every Fifteen Minutes by Lisa Scottoline (Apr. 14, hardcover, $27.99, ISBN 978-0-250-01011-7). A sociopath has sets his sights on Dr. Eric Parish, chief of one of America’s top psychiatric units. Recently separated from his wife and trying to be a good single dad to his seven-year-old daughter, Eric is more vulnerable than he realizes.

St. Martin’s/Dunne

Pinnacle Event by Richard A. Clarke (May 19, hardcover, $26.99, ISBN 978-1-250-04798-4). While in power, the South African apartheid regime made nuclear weapons. Later, its leaders told the U.N. that the weapons were destroyed. In fact, the weapons were secretly stored by a white South African exile group. Now they have been refurbished and sold, but to whom?

Scribner

Palace of Treason by Jason Matthews (May 5, hardcover, $26.99, ISBN 978-1-4767-9374-0). Capt. Dominika Egorova of the SVR, the Russian Intelligence Service, despises the men she serves, the oligarchs, crooks, and thugs of Putin’s Russia. What no one knows is that Dominika is working for the CIA as Washington’s most sensitive penetration of SVR and the Kremlin.

Severn House

Condemned to Death: A Burren Mystery by Cora Harrison (Feb. 1, hardcover, $28.95, ISBN 978-0-7278-8442-8). Law and social history blend in Harrison’s 12th historical set in 16th-century Ireland. When a boat containing the body of an unidentified man drifts onto the shore of the Kingdom of the Burren, investigating magistrate Mara suspects foul play.

Severn House/Crème de la Crime

At Death’s Window by Jim Kelly (Feb. 1, hardcover, $28.95, ISBN 978-1-78029-068-3). The fifth Shaw and Valentine police procedural kicks off with a man being killed in the crime wars over samphire, a much-prized edible plant grown on the Norfolk coast. Detectives Shaw and Valentine must also contend with a possibly related problem: the vandalizing of pricey second homes along the coast.

Simon & Schuster

The Fifth Gospel by Ian Caldwell (Mar. 3, hardcover, $25.99, ISBN 978-1-4767-9414-7). Two brothers, one a Greek Orthodox priest and the other a Roman Catholic priest, are involved in a controversial exhibit at a Vatican museum proving that the Shroud of Turin is, contrary to recent carbon dating tests, authentic.

Simon & Schuster/Gallery

The Bullet by Mary Louise Kelly (Mar. 17, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-1-4767-6981-3). Caroline Cashion, a professor of French literature, is stunned to learn from an MRI that she has a bullet lodged at the base of her skull. In the course of one awful evening, Caroline learns about a shocking double murder in Atlanta when she was three years old.

Soho Crime

Innocence: Or, Murder on Steep Street by Heda Margolius Kovály (June 2, hardcover, $25.95, ISBN 978-1-61695-496-3). Set in early 1950s Prague, this psychological thriller-cum-detective novel follows the unfolding investigation into a murder at a cinema while telling the stories of the women who work there as ushers, each forced to support herself in difficult circumstances.

Nobody Walks by Mick Herron (Feb. 17, hardcover, $25.95, ISBN 978-1-61695-486-4). Thomas Bettany, a former undercover spy, looks into the suspicious death of his estranged son, Liam. Liam took a fatal fall from the balcony of his London flat, apparently under the influence of a new drug. Bettany’s quest leads him to the unstable head of the Intelligence Service.

Subterranean

The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons: A Bernie Rhodenbarr Mystery by Lawrence Block (Apr. 30, hardcover, $30, ISBN 978-1-59606-701-1). The 11th Bernie Rhodenbarr mystery finds the lighthearted and light-fingered thief breaking into houses, apartments, and even a museum in an adventure replete with American colonial silver, an F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscript, and a priceless portrait.

Viking

Dry Bones: A Walt Longmire Mystery by Craig Johnson (May 12, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-525-42693-6). When the largest, most complete fossil of a Tyrannosaurus rex ever found is discovered in Wyoming’s Absaroka County, it appears to have nothing to do with Sheriff Walt Longmire—until the Cheyenne rancher who claims it is found face down in a turtle pond.