AGAINST THEIR WILL

An investigator bounced off one case against her will takes on another that turns out to be just as fraught.

In the post-newspaper era, Danny Boyd has worked for several years with The Open, a network of open-source journalists who take on particularly perilous assignments. Her latest, an operation designed to unmask the leaders of a child smuggling ring, comes tantalizingly close to success before it crashes and burns. As a result, Marcel, the New York contact who recruited Danny, tells her she’ll have to step away from her work for several months in order to keep her colleagues safe. Frustrated, she signs a contract with the Ohio-based Wilson family. Their patriarch, developer Bob Wilson, was shot dead in a botched robbery months before his pancreatic cancer would have killed him, and now an illegitimate son, Wade George, has popped up out of nowhere. The Wilsons want Danny to check out the interloper’s bona fides before he can claim a slice of the family pie. Danny, who’s especially happy to be in Columbus for reasons of her own, begins by exploring the particulars of Bob Wilson’s unusually persnickety will before training her attention on Sandy, his paralyzed widow, and their children, Australian transplant Robert, Wilson Developments Vice President Anthony, daughter Kat, and Josh, the baby of the family in more ways than one. It turns out that every one of them is hiding a secret as juicy as anything Danny can find on Wade George. The only downside—and it’s a steep one—is that she’s being followed by sinister figures apparently connected to her new case, or maybe the one that got away.

The investigator survives to claim the motto “wrong, but right”; readers may differ about how well her two cases dovetail.