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HOME FIRES by Claire Booth

HOME FIRES

by Claire Booth

Pub Date: April 2nd, 2024
ISBN: 9781448310807
Publisher: Severn House

A shorthanded police department in Branson, Missouri, deals with a major disaster and an unexpected murder.

Sheriff Hank Worth is at the funeral for an unpopular medical examiner with top law enforcement officials from southwestern Missouri when everyone’s beepers go off. All that’s left of the Skyrocket fireworks warehouse is a still-burning crater containing an unknown number of dead bodies. The authorities know that about 14 people worked there. Faye Halliday, who owned the place with her husband, is both hysterical and evasive. Because of the possibility of a terrorist attack, help arrives from several federal agencies even as Worth tries to deal with reporters without mentioning this possibility. His second-in-command, Sheila Turley, returns early from medical leave to help out despite her pain. The best information Worth gets is from a young man who worked at Skyrocket before he enlisted in the Marines. He tells them about a mysterious locked room that doesn’t appear in the building plans. In the absence of the ME, Turley calls on the University of Missouri, which sends its entire pathology department and a forensic anthropologist to identify the bodies. Skyrocket was in financial trouble and may have been cutting corners, but Worth suspects the locked room holds the key to the mystery. His life is turned upside down when the pathologists uncover years of sloppy work by the late ME, who listed cardiac arrest as the cause of death for many people without even examining them. One of those people was Worth’s mother-in-law, whose death two years earlier now seems to have been murder.

An excellent procedural with the added attraction of a difficult, personally painful mystery.