Excerpt of Merit Badge Murder by Leslie Langtry

It's not every day you find al-Qaeda's number four operative dead in a Girl Scout camp in Iowa.

The body was twisted unnaturally in the rope course's spider web element that consisted of a large wood frame crisscrossed with elastic bungee cords. Sadly, it was my troop's favorite thing to do at camp. Now I had to disappoint them. I hated disappointing them.

A man hung there. He had been in his twenties and of Middle Eastern descent. The neck was clearly broken before he was placed into the ropes at Camp Singing Bird. He looked surprised to find himself here. I'm sure the irony would be lost on him that in death, he really was surrounded by seventy-two virgins. Did it matter that they were grade-schoolers, I wondered? Maybe that was just splitting hairs.

I would've been surprised too, had I not been through this kind of thing before. But I'd seen this stuff in Syria and Uzbekistan. Not in the placid, wooded hills of eastern Iowa.

And my second grade troop was due at any minute. I was pretty sure I couldn't pass this off as something adorable, like I had with the bats in Tinder Trails Cabin or the mice in the latrines. Troop Leader's Helpful Hint #1—if your Girl Scouts freak out upon meeting a bat/mouse/wolf spider for the first time, tell them it's just a baby bat/mouse/wolf spider. Little girls are suckers for that, and soon what was scary is adorbs!—whatever that means.

I bent to take his pulse, just to make sure. Yup. He was dead. His glassy eyes were opened wide, and his mouth hung open. Dammit. I need this like I needed wet work in the slums of Rio.