EVIDENCE OF MURDER

A bereaved coroner is stymied by the apparent suicide of a beautiful young mother.

It’s a deadly cold winter in Cleveland, and forensic investigator Theresa MacLean is barely functioning. Still in shock over the murder of her fiancé, a cop, she is beginning to screw up, not in her science, but in her handling of the human side of criminal cases. Carried along only by dedication and love for her teenage daughter, but emotionally as frozen as the subzero winds off Lake Erie, Theresa finds herself beginning to thaw after a missing person turns up dead with no signs of violence. In fact, lovely former escort Jillian Perry is found with barely a mark on her, seemingly frozen to death with only one small spot on her sweatshirt sleeve. But would the happy, healthy and loving mother of an infant really have chosen to wander off into the woods to die from exposure? Pairing up with a cousin who was her fiancé’s partner, Theresa looks into Jillian’s strange life and finds that her husband did not father baby Cara; her best friend may have been a stalker; and her late grandparents left a fortune to Cara. Two other cases complicate the story as Theresa delves further into the actions of the stalker-buddy and the now-wealthy husband, analyzing fibers, substances and stomach contents to prove a most ingenious murder. Black (Takeover, 2008), a former forensic scientist, knows her stuff and briskly leads readers along the trail of clues right behind her likeable, no-nonsense heroine.

Smart science propels this intelligent, well-thought-out crime thriller.