Reviewed by Anne-Marie Reynolds for Readers' Favorite

Shots Fired on Reading Road by Jeffrey C Schare is the story of the 1961 murder of Cincinnati Patrolman Donald Martin and the decades-long effort to identify his killer. Martin was working overnight patrol when he stopped at a car dealership on Reading Road and interrupted a theft in progress. Within minutes, he had been shot with his own service revolver. Detectives recovered the weapon along with clothing believed to belong to the shooter, and eyewitnesses got a look at the man responsible, but even with hundreds of suspects investigated and thousands of people questioned, no arrest was ever made. One name kept surfacing, Walter Baker Walls, yet the case against him never became strong enough to bring to trial, and the file went cold for over four decades. In 2005, Cincinnati detectives Jeff Schare and Kurt Ballman picked it up again after an unrelated tip pointed them back to Martin's file, setting off a fresh investigation built on old evidence, new interviews, and secrets the passing years had finally revealed.

Shots Fired on Reading Road by Jeffrey C Schare has the advantage of being written by one of the two detectives who reopened the case, and that firsthand perspective shapes the whole book. Jeffrey lays out the reinvestigation methodically, showing exactly how a wrong lead took him back to the old files and how patient interviews with retired detectives, surviving witnesses, and the suspect's own family slowly pried open a silence that had held for over forty years. He is careful about what the evidence actually supports, distinguishing between confirmed fact and reconstructed probability rather than presenting theories as certainties. Because the case closes to an investigative conclusion rather than a courtroom verdict, the book spends its final chapters reflecting on what resolution looks like when a trial is no longer possible, and on properly restoring Martin as a person rather than a case file. It is a clearly written, well-documented account that will suit readers who want their true crime grounded in real police work rather than dramatized speculation.