If you're like me, you like to start reading a new series with Book 1 and move on through the rest in order.   You can certainly do that with the Hacker Golf Mystery series. But let me tell you a little about its history.

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I look at the first two books in the Hacker series, Death is a Two-Stroke Penalty and Death from the Ladies Tee as sorta-kinda prequels.  These two books were published back in the 1990s, by Thomas Dunne Books at St. Martin's Press. While a little dated now, they're still pretty good stand alone mystery stories. With golf, of course.

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It was sometime around 2005 that I decided to start again with Hacker. But this time, I wanted to construct a narrative arc to the story, since my goal was to create an on-going Hacker mystery for each of the four major golf championships.

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So Death at the Member-Guest is the real start of the series.  In that book our hero Hacker is invited to join a friend for a weekend of golf and boozy fun at a member-guest tournament at a private club north of Boston. Naturally, a murder takes place and Hacker has to try and solve the crime.  But this book introduces Mary Jane Cappalletti, his upstairs neighbor in his North End of Boston apartment, and Mary Jane's precocious daughter Victoria.

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Mary Jane, who quickly becomes Hacker's girlfriend, returns in each of the next four books. She's kidnapped in Death in a Green Jacket; there's a kilted wedding at the end of Death from the Claret Jug (not as dramatic as George R.R. Martin's Red Wedding, but it has its moments); she's pregnant in An Open Case of Death, and the baby DJ is introduced in PGA Spells Death.

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Mary Jane's father-in-law, the Boston mob boss Carmine Spoleto, also plays a role in all of the books including and after Member-Guest.

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Whether you take them on one at a time, or in order, I sincerely hope you enjoy the Hacker series as much as I enjoyed writing them.

James Y. Bartlett

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