Sins of the Son by Martin J. Woods

A quirky librarian, a strawberry blond and a virtuous ex-con. Can they help Joe Mann discover the strange truth about a double murder, stolen jewelry, his father...and himself?

Ed Kutz, a convicted murderer of two policemen, has just been pronounced dead after crashing an expensive Porsche into a telephone pole outside of Gold%u2019s Lake, New York. But what, Joe Mann wonders, was he doing in a $100,000 sports car just weeks after being released from serving forty years in prison?

Troubled in his marriage and unhappy with his similarity to his womanizing father, Joe Mann drives north to the upstate New York town to try to solve a forty year old mystery between the double murder of two policemen and a spectacular jewel heist.

Joe's father had written a bestselling book about the original murders and just before he died had hinted to Joe about a connection to the jewel heist. As Joe starts pulling strings, though, he finds he must dodge both the net of the sadistic local police chief, Bull, Jr. and the temptations of Melissa, a strawberry blond bartender who is close to proving Joe even more like his father than he thought.

The more Joe unravels the complicated web that has been woven over the last forty years between Ed Kutz, his partner Hoot Gibbons, and the menacing dynasty of two father and son police chiefs, the more Joe realizes that accounting for the sins of a son might require an uneasy forgiveness of the father.