Leather Maiden

Leather Maiden is a crime novel by the American writer Joe R. Lansdale, published in 2008.

Cason Statler is a disturbed Iraq War veteran who has returned to his home town of Camp Rapture, Texas, after being driven out of Houston by a scandalous affair. He drinks too much and follows his old girlfriend around, and with nothing better to occupy him he takes a job as a reporter on the small town newspaper.

At the paper he finds the notes his predecessor left behind on a cold case murder, and he decides that working the case will keep him out of trouble. It does the opposite: the closer he comes to what happened, the further his own life spins out of control, particularly once he begins to suspect that his upstanding brother may have had something to do with it. The murder is years old, and the people who were closest to it are not all willing to see it opened again. Matters are not improved when an army friend of his called Booger turns up to lend a hand.