THE COLD WAY HOME

Three detectives whose lives have been badly damaged hunt for the truth about family murders generations apart.

Bell Elkins has seen the law from both sides (Bone On Bone, 2018, etc.). She’s served as a West Virginia prosecuter and served a prison term for killing her abusive father when she was a child, a crime she is unable to remember. While she’s waiting to reapply for her law license, Bell has joined two old friends—retired sheriff Nick Fogelsong, whose wife has filed for divorce, and Jake Oakes, a wheelchair-bound former cop shot in the line of duty—to form a detective agency that often helps the present district attorney, who’s chronically short of money in a county whose citizens are frequently drug-addicted and desperately poor. Their latest case is to find Maggie Folsom’s missing daughter, Dixie Sue. While looking for her, Bell goes to Briney Hollow, a place that awakens unwelcome childhood memories. Deep in the woods are the ruins of Wellwood, a state mental institution that burned down. The body Bell finds there is not that of Dixie Sue but Darla Gilley’s, whose dying brother, Joe, was Nick’s best friend in high school. Darla had parted ways with her alcoholic husband and was living in the attic of her family home, upstairs from Joe and his wife, Brenda. The estranged husband has an alibi, but he admits that Darla had recently found a book in the attic that had badly upset her. Bell’s research and the family diary Darla mailed Nick before her death reveal horrifying information about the myriad lobotomies performed at Wellwood and the unsolved murder of the ancestor who wrote the diary. Bell is cheered by a new puppy, Nick is immersed in an affair, and Jake attempts to deal with his girlfriend’s desire to have a baby of her own. But all are determined to put aside their own misfortunes to find Darla’s killer.

A gritty tale of despair, family pride, hope, and second chances.