{"product_id":"2940015496093","title":"Who Killed Rita Colleridge?","description":"When highway patrolman Buck Wolfe investigates the death of neuroscientist Rita Colleridge at the base of a Mendocino, California bluff, he won't buy the accepted conclusion that it was a suicide. Wolfe admits he is just a rural policeman and not nearly as sophisticated as big city cops, but he takes it on his own to investigate the scientist's death. What he uncovers is a series of mysterious events that would baffle even the most experienced sleuth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWolfe has entered the world of drugs — not street drugs, but the esoteric world of pharmaceutical drugs, where the introduction of a successful new medicine could be worth billions to its manufacturer and a Nobel prize to its originator. Wolfe learns that Rita Colleridge worked for the Steiner Institute, a company heavily involved in research for a drug with the working title of AP45. Steiner boasts that it’s a drug that will resolve memory retention and recall and quite likely cure Alzheimer's and dementia.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eColleridge's work was so secretive that only she had access to her findings, which were stored in her computer with codes only she could decipher. Even Otto Steiner, developer of the drug, was unable to access Rita's research, so within a day of her death Steiner hires a new researcher, Richard Craig, to try and crack the encrypted codes that Rita had used to protect the results of her experiments.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSteiner lets Craig know he has a deadline on his hands.  Steiner is so confident that the results of the tests on AP45 will be positive, that the new drug is scheduled for introduction at an international conference to be held in Erice, Sicily, in three weeks. Craig immediately gets to work, but so does Rita's assailant, who will do anything to gain access to the results of Rita's experiments — and more especially the formula for AP45.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMore mysterious murders convince Wolfe, and finally, his superiors, that the case needs his undivided attention. To that end, Wolfe brings in an old friend and former Interpol agent, Bill Barnes, who is now working in Europe, to help with the investigation. The case eventually flows to Sicily as the day of the convention nears. More conspirators enter the scene, including a foreign drug manufacturer and the ever-present Mafia, which finds it has a potential goldmine in the formula for AP45 which has landed right in its back yard. Don Augusto Cicarelli, the Falcone Family boss also discovers that Steiner was not completely honest about what his AP45 was capable of. He had in fact been distracting everyone away from it’s real purpose – one that made the drug much more valuable.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBarnes, whose assignment from Buck was more to protect Richard Craig than anything, learns about the plot to kill off those with the formula in hand.  He is quick to follow them to a monastery in Sicily, where it is about to be delivered into the wrong hands. Not only is an Italian scientist involved, but also on hand is a German pharmaceutical company, several Mafiosi and cohorts for all parties. Barnes gets caught in a vicious crossfire of automatic weapons and gives his life as he attempts to save the elusive formula now on a memory stick. Others die and the formula “disappears.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor Wolfe the showdown in Sicily still does not satisfy him that the case is solved. Rita’s murderer, he is convinced, is still at large. And he is so right. The dénouement takes Wolfe to a remote cabin in the High Sierra, where the tangled web of the Engram Project plays out in an ending that would make Agatha Christie proud.","brand":"Arrowhead Classics Publishing Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47070925684976,"sku":"2940015496093","price":5.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940015496093_p0.jpg?v=1763620538","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940015496093","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}