THICKER THAN WATER

Pennsylvania State Trooper Jim Duncan responds to a call regarding a missing autistic young man. When the boy is quickly found, Jim thinks the case is closed…until the young man insists the police need to help a “sleeping blue lady” and leads them to a dead woman in an abandoned shack, clad in only her underwear.

Meanwhile, defense attorney Sally Castle is searching for a troubled young woman who wandered into her office wanting protection from an unnamed man…and disappeared before Sally could obtain any details. Sally is bothered by the incident and unnerved when she discovers that Jim’s dead body and her missing potential client are the same person.

Jim and Sally soon discover the young woman led a secret double life, with ties to the autistic boy who started it all. As Jim and Sally investigate, the case takes increasingly ominous turns, uncovering hidden money and a seamy underbelly of sex work, before turning into a desperate race to stop a killer. Can Jim and Sally solve the case in time to stop the murder of an innocent boy?

. . .

“A pitch-perfect procedural with excellent pacing, and crisp dialogue. It’s the relationships that had me speeding through the pages. This is one where I didn’t see the ending, and where a crime was a crime, but I sympathized with the motivation. Brava!” 

~ Gabriel Valjan, Agatha, Anthony and Shamus-nominated author of the Shane Cleary Mysteries Series