Death Roll (2007)

Marilyn Victor and Michael Allan Mallory's first novel, published by Five Star in 2007, is narrated by Lavender "Snake" Jones, a zookeeper and co-host of the Minnesota Valley Zoo's cable programme Zoofari, married to the Australian crocodile curator Jeff Jones. When the zoo's director Anthony Wright is murdered on the night of the Beastly Ball and ends up, as the jacket puts it, a late-night snack for the zoo's fifteen-foot crocodile Sebastian, the police arrest the crocodile keeper JR Erling, and Snake sets out to prove her friend innocent. The jacket flap summarises the plot; an afterword introduces the authors. (Open Library)

Watches

Timex (unidentified model): Gary Olson, the University of Minnesota sophomore who is Zoofari's first intern, keeps twisting the metal band of his scuffed-up Timex from the first chapter, where Snake grabs his wrist to read that thirty minutes remain before the Beastly Ball. After the murder a Timex with a dented, tarnished and broken metal band sits in the bag of Anthony Wright's personal effects on Detective Ole Sorenson's desk, assumed to be the dead man's because it was found at the bottom of the crocodile pool with his severed hand. Snake works out that Wright wore a Longines and that the Timex came off Gary's wrist in the struggle on the footbridge, and traps him at the wrap party with a planted watch; a photograph in his living room shows his stepfather, a zookeeper, wearing the same battered Timex with an alligator clamped on its band. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: This Timex was found at the bottom of the croc pool when the police found Wright's severed hand. They assumed it was his watch. But it was yours. (Marilyn Victor and Michael Allan Mallory, Death Roll, scan cataloged as Five Star, 2007, p. 331; Snake first reads the time from his scuffed-up Timex on p. 16, the watch sits in the evidence bag on pp. 204 and 209 and the photograph of his stepfather wearing it is on p. 333; his full name is on p. 8; Internet Archive scan OCR)

Longines La Grande Classique: The zoo director's own watch turns up in a pile of crocodile dung, where Jeff finds it after Sebastian has passed it: a nicked but still running analog watch with a twisted and mangled gold metallic band. Snake, who once dated a man who liked jewellery, tells Detective Sorenson that it is a Longines Grande Classique with a retail list price of over eight hundred dollars, that no member of the zoo staff could afford it, that Melanie Wright will confirm it and that the Zoofari tapes show Wright wearing a gold-banded watch; Sebastian bit off Wright's left hand and the watch went with it. The text twice spells the maker "Longine"; the collection name is given, no reference.

Source text: Take a closer look, Detective. It's a Longine, not the sort of thing you pick up at the neighborhood Wal-Mart. In fact it's a Longine Grande Classique. These puppies have a retail list price of over eight hundred dollars. (Marilyn Victor and Michael Allan Mallory, Death Roll, scan cataloged as Five Star, 2007, p. 313, closing up the OCR's line-break hyphens in "Detective" and "Classique"; the watch's condition and discovery are described on the same page and Wright's severed hand on pp. 313 to 314; Internet Archive scan OCR)