Kasulis offers a small-town investigative thriller about a decades-old murder.

When Cassandra “Cassie” Klein returns to her late mother’s house in Minnesota, she lets out a scream. The source of her distress is a photo of her former teacher, Jack Cicero; when Cassie sees the picture, she recalls repressed trauma from her childhood. Cassie believes she was sexually assaulted by Jack, and that she was not his only victim. She recalls a classmate named Alissa Rawlins who received special attention from Jack. Doing some digging, she learns that Alissa disappeared some 20 years ago, leading her to surmise that Jack killed her classmate. The case has been cold for years—who’s going to believe her? Jack Cicero is a well-respected figure in the small town of Waterford, Minnesota, so much so that he won “teacher of the year. Every year.” In the present day, Jack is in a nursing home, where he’ll most likely die. Jack’s stepdaughter, Morgan, is a member of Waterford’s city council and a key figure in revitalizing the town. She doesn’t take kindly to any assertions that Jack was a predator, let alone a murderer. To further complicate matters, Morgan is married to Cassie’s ex-husband, Warren. Morgan already bears some animosity toward Cassie, and she’s certainly not going to listen to any accusations about her stepfather. Enter Deputy Keith Malone, who formerly worked as a policeman in Minneapolis and now seeks a less stressful life with a post at the Kanabec County Sheriff’s Office. Even with the benefit of Keith’s big-city experience, the deputy and Cassie will have a difficult time getting to the bottom of what happened to Alissa Rawlins.

The narrative’s early pages introduce an enticing setup full of questions—Cassie’s sudden awakening to her past opens the door for all kinds of possibilities. Is Jack really the cause of Alissa’s disappearance, or might Cassie be mistaken? By all outward appearances, Alissa “went off with Jack and then she disappeared,” but it was a long time ago…and perhaps Cassie is misremembering. As the story continues, readers learn a great deal about the characters and the town of Waterford. The hamlet is a place where the newspaper reports on such events as a “sale of aluminum cans donated from the boy scouts [to] cover a small fireworks display on July fourth.” Some information is unnecessarily repeated; for example, at one point Cassie goes to the nursing home where Jack lives, where she confronts her mostly nonresponsive accused abuser with statements like “I hate how you’ve made me feel. How you’ve ruined my life for one afternoon of enjoyment for you.” While it’s an effective scene, the fact that she visited and subsequently upset an “uncommunicative man” is repeated both to Morgan and later to Keith, when readers already know what’s happened. Still, with compelling flashbacks to the 1990s and plenty of conflict, the story will keep readers engaged as it pushes forward.

A potent and memorable portrayal of a crime seemingly lost to time.