FORGOTTEN TRAIL

Two investigative agents find that a seemingly straightforward case in Pinnacles National Park may be more meandering than they expected.

Investigative Services Branch Special Agent Felicity Harland barely caught the email that added some of California’s smaller national parks to her list of responsibilities. So when she gets a call about a murder at the Pinnacles Grand Hotel, she has to search her memory to assure herself that it’s in her jurisdiction these days. On the phone, hotel manager James Dunaway, intent on going forward with the hotel’s planned grand opening as soon as the crime is solved, demands that Felicity come out to investigate. Felicity’s dubious, not only because the four-and-a-half-mile hike to the hotel’s remote location is strenuous, but also because her partner in crime-solving, Ferdinand “Hux” Huxley, seems to be off the grid closer to his Sequoia National Park home. She’s not one to let her personal feelings get in the way of duty, though, so she hits the trail to Pinnacles to see what’s what. When she pulls in Bodie Cramer, a pal from her days at the FBI, to help with forensic work on the case, Felicity wonders whether Hux will feel threatened by her friendship with Bodie, which is hard to describe. Felicity and Hux aren’t exactly friends; they’re certainly not more than friends; but they do share a deep connection that she’s reluctant to disturb. When the two of them find Chris Denton with a silk tie cinched around his neck and a glass shard stuck in his back, there’s little question he’s been murdered, with his disgruntled wife the obvious suspect. But like the park it’s set in, the real story has a lot more nooks and nuances.

A deft balance of the mystery, the heroine’s ongoing development, and the well-researched setting.