There are monsters in Mirkwood!

Growing up is hard, but it’s even harder when you are a dwarf, living in a small town in Nebraska, where other kids physically torment you and everyone else shuns you, leaving you as an outcast. If you’re Dr. Robert “Mongo” Frederickson, you might even move to New York City and get a PhD in criminology, becoming a university professor after giving up a highly successful career in the circus. It’d take a lot to bring you back to your home town… such as the death of a favourite nephew.

Tommy was a bright kid. He had an incredibly high IQ and was a veritable wizard with a computer. He was also a very big fan of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and was part of a group of kids who played a game called “Sorscience”, where you score points by matching real-life phenomena to events from The Lord of the Rings. He and a fellow player were discovered dead, apparently a murder-suicide between two young gay lovers. The town is shocked and so nobody minds it when the whole incident is covered up as quickly as possible. But Mongo is then hired by an unusual person: Coop Lugmor, who abused Mongo when they were children, tries to hire the dwarf to investigate the deaths. According to Coop, his younger brother was no “fag” and he wants Mongo to prove it and catch the person who did this.