Publisher's Synopsis
It's dark as Elliott Garrett heads home on a deserted, rural two-lane highway, thinking of his beautiful wife and infant daughter waiting for him in Raleigh, North Carolina. But Elliott doesn't know that behind the next set of oncoming headlights is an ugly chapter of his life he thought was safely in the past - and that this moment, it's coming back over the horizon and heading straight for him. When Elliott never arrives home, his grieving wife brings in young legal investigator J. Davis Swaine III to find out what exactly happened to her husband on that shadowy highway and who is behind it. Swaine, raised working class and now in the employ of one of the South's top civil trial firms, has seen more human vice and misery in his short career than most adults ever will - he's even killed a man himself. But nothing can prepare him for the series of killings that is coming, nor for the vindictiveness and hatred behind them. And, because Jeff's new girlfriend is Elliott Garrett's sister in law, how intensely personal this case will become. In this follow-up to the Kindle bestselling mystery Felonious Jazz, Bryan Gilmer illuminates both the disturbingly understandable motivations of his villain and the not-always-heroic thoughts and drives of his protagonist. This is a crime thriller with brains, a novel that shows us the complexity of the real New American South, where multinational corporations neighbor centuries-old tobacco farms, and where the past is never truly resolved - even when it's hidden beneath a glossy 21st century veneer. "Bryan Gilmer steers us on a tense thrill ride through the real New South. Gilmer writes what he knows, and knows of what he writes." -- Bryan Gruley - author of The Skeleton Box, a Starvation Lake mystery ""It's fast-paced and full of surprises, right through the last page, and the use of local color is absolutely perfect. This one deserves a place on your Kindle or bookshelf." J.D. Rhoades - author of Gallows Pole and Breaking Cover
