GHOST TOWNS

You might not think it of the remote little mountain town of Dudley, Arizona, but an awful lot of victims live there—which means that Chloe Newcombe, Victim Advocate operating out of the County Attorney’s office (High Lonesome Road, 2001, etc.), is one whirling dervish. Her problems this time start with State Supreme Court Judge Cal Thomas’s inexplicable disappearance. When he’s found shot twice in the head at the old hotel in nearby Windy City, pop. zero (a ghost town since the copper mines closed), Deputy Sheriff Hector Estrada needs a Victim Advocate to break the horrible news to the judge’s widow. Once envied for beauty, respected for class, and admired for good works, Lee Thomas has become for mysterious reasons, Chloe discovers, a bitterly unhappy recluse, living in a house to big for her, abandoned by her daughter, but unfortunately not by her batty old mother. In the meantime, Chloe’s young reporter friend Nate Pendergast, who’d been deep in a story about the murdered Judge, has vanished, as has Chloe’s lover, Craig Williams, another citizen with complicated connections to the judge. What’s going on? Never mind what’s in the actual job description for a Victim Advocate; Chloe is determined to find out.

Loose plotting, perfunctory denouement. Still, there’s Chloe, plucky, fallible, and endearing—the stuff of which Saving Graces are made.