Book 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 fathers job as a county sheriff's deputy.
Now the bones of a Melungeon woman who disappeared ten years ago 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 was 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 womans 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? An
unlikely pair of sleuths find there's no escaping the past, whether or
not it's their own. Veterinarian Rachel Goddard and Police Captain Tom
Bridger have moved to Mountainview, Va., trying to forget the violence
that overtook them in their debut (The Heat of the Moon, not reviewed).
Several skeletons are unearthed on a nearby mountain, including that of
Pauline Turner McClure, a beautiful Melungeon of mixed-race ancestry who
married into a wealthy family and vanished after the death of her
husband, leaving her daughter Mary Lee to inherit a large estate. As a
half-Melungeon, Tom is more than a little interested in the case,
especially since it was one of the rare failures in his father's career.
When Holly Turner, Pauline's look-alike animal-loving niece, gets a job
at Rachel's clinic, Holly's relatives and her father, the local drug
dealer who's the prime suspect in Pauline's murder, want her to return
home, perhaps because her nightmares may reveal too much about the
strife-ridden past of the McClures and the Turners. Meantime, Tom gets
shot by a suspect and Rachel is threatened and fired upon when she
refuses to let Holly's relatives drag her away from her new life. Tom
must dig deeply into a case that threatens his respect for his father,
and Rachel must face her worst fears before a violent confrontation
brings closure. Fast-paced, chilling and compulsively readable. 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.
