Description:
Tom Bridger, who is half Melungeon, thought he had escaped his mountain community's lingering prejudice against the mixed-race group when he left to work for the Richmond, Virginia Police Department. Tom was moving up the detective ranks when a family tragedy brought him back home and moved him into his father's job as a county sheriff's deputy.
Now the bones of a Melungeon woman have surfaced on a remote mountaintop, and all evidence points to murder. Violence escalates as the victim's poor family and the wealthy white family she married into scramble to protect their secrets from Toms probing. But as he probes into his father's investigation of the case, he finds his father is not the man he idolized.
The woman Tom is falling in love with, veterinarian Rachel Goddard, is struggling to start over in a place that holds no memories for her. Rachel puts herself in danger when she befriends the dead Melungeon woman's niece, Holly. As a child, the girl witnessed something that could implicate her aunt's killer, but she is too terrified to tell anyone what she knows. While Rachel is determined to keep Holly safe and help her piece together past events, the guilty are equally determined to silence the girl--and Rachel too, if necessary.
Will this murder be Tom's and Rachel's undoing or will it free them to look into the future?
Brief description:
Sandra Parshall grew up in South Carolina and has worked as a reporter on newspapers in South Carolina, West Virginia, and Baltimore. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband, a long-time Washington journalist, and three cats.
Review Quotes: "Edge-of-the-seat suspense and a budding romance for Tom and Rachel make this essential reading for fans of Margaret Maron and Karin Slaughter" --Library Journal, starred review
"Fast-paced, chilling and compulsively readable." --Kirkus Reviews "This is a fascinating book of past mysteries, present threats, and a young woman who remembered things she was told never happened." --Mysterious Women