An Occasional Hell(1993)

Randall Silvis

P.I. Ernest DeWalt snooped on two-timing spouses for twenty years until a hail of bullets knocked him out of the game. DeWalt winds up teaching literature courses in a nearly comatose college town. A fellow faculty member--in the throes of a fling with the wife of a small-time rock singer--ends up with a musket ball in his brain. It's too hard to say no to the dead man's wife, when she asks DeWalt to crawl out of his shell and bring his private-eye prowess into play just one more time.