CIRCLES OF DEATH

After genetic testing suggests that a young woman’s family may not be who they say they are, her investigation into the past is interrupted by a local wildlife emergency.

Twenty-seven years ago, a young mother on the Eastern Shore of Maryland chose to place her infant on a minister’s doorstep rather than let the baby be sold by her cruel partner to “a loathsome couple from Baltimore.” After leaving the baby with only a note reading “My name is Noel,” the girl vanished into the night. In the present day, Noel Sinclair runs into Hannah Ives, whose grandchildren she used to babysit. Hannah says she’s been busy “building family trees from DNA data that’s been uploaded to recreational databases like Ancestry, 23andMe and GenTree” to help the police solve crimes. Noel soon shares the results of a recent DNA test she and her sister both took, which suggest that they aren’t even remotely related. Given her knack for diligent investigation, Hannah wants to help Noel figure out what’s going on, so she dives into the rabbit hole that is genealogical research. The two women also spend time catching up with each other at Our Song, the vacation cottage Hannah recently bought with her husband. As Hannah shows Noel some bald eagles there, the women spot a set of birds that seem to have gotten sick from eating a dead fox. But when they bring the birds to Hoots, the local bird rescue, it begins to look like someone deliberately poisoned the fox with carbofuran and that the birds may have died as a result. Now that Hannah and Noel are focusing on the question of who might want to poison local wildlife, Hannah leads the investigative charge with her meticulous research and ability to fly under the radar, hoping, like Noel, to find a happy resolution before more animals become victims.

Two mysteries plotted with an eye for the details of both subjects set this series apart.