Crime and Gummibears

Detective Sergeant Michael O’Halloran has spent twenty-seven years with the Baltimore Police Department without ever firing his weapon in the line of duty.

Then he walks into a bank robbery.

His response is fast, instinctive—and deadly. While the department investigates the shooting, Michael is left at a desk with far too much time to think about the choices that brought him there.

His memories carry him back to Spring Break 1979, when he, Jimmy Marshall and Paul Cunningham were three ordinary junior-high boys testing how much they could get away with. Smoking behind the community hall. Stealing booze for a camping trip. Shoplifting from old man Sanks’ tiny country store.

Michael’s contribution to their criminal careers?

A pack of Gummibears he didn’t even like.

What seemed like a ridiculous teenage mistake becomes part of a much larger question: how much of a life can turn on one impulsive choice—and how different might everything have been if someone had made another one?

Crime and Gummibears is a compact, character-driven suspense story about friendship, memory, guilt, growing up and the small decisions that echo across a lifetime, told with Mark Posey’s dry humor and deeply human focus on choices and consequences.