title: The Mountain Massacres: A Bomber Hanson Mystery
author:  David Champion 
description: Young, likable lawyer Tod Hanson, a musician at heart who stutters only around his famous father and boss, trial attorney Bomber Hanson, narrates this sketchy series debut. Bomber agrees to defend Bart O'Neil, hippie-mountain man accused of killing the neighbor who shot his dogs. In his role as investigator, skeptical Tod visits the central California coastal mountain community where the murder occurred. In addition to an odd assortment of hippies who seem all to be related by marriage and divorces, he meets their new neighbor, who is rich enough to build an expensive home behind an electronic gate, and uncovers a long-standing feud over rights to a well. Tod's probing paints a grim picture of Bart's prospects, although Bomber seems pleased with his son's progress. Sensitive and amusing father-son interplay is stronger than Champion's thin plot, wrapped up here in a final courtroom scene. <br />Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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  **Part I**
  
  THE CRYSTAL MOUNTAIN
  
  1
  
  THERE WERE NO STARS that night on the bush airstrip, nor any moon; just the
  West African darkness wrapping round the scattered groups like warm, wet
  velvet. The cloud cover was lying hardly off the tops of the iroko trees, and
  the waiting men prayed it would stay a while longer to shield them from the
  bombers.
  
  At the end of the runway the battered old DC-4, which had just slipped in for
  a landing by runway lights that stayed alight for just the last fifteen
  seconds of final approach, turned and coughed its way blindly toward the palm-
  thatch huts.
  
  Between two of them, five white men sat crouched in a Land Rover and stared
  toward the incoming aircraft. They said nothing, but the same thought was in
  each man’s mind. If they did not get out of the battered and crumbling enclave
  before the forces of the central government overran the last few square miles,
  they would not get out alive. Each man had a price on his head and 