NO ACCIDENT

Posadas County, New Mexico, Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman investigates a suspicious accident that strikes all too close to home even though it’s taken place in another time zone.

While they’re trying out their new tandem bicycle, Estelle’s son Carlos and his fiancee, graphic artist Tasha Qarshe, are struck by a pickup truck. Both of them are seriously injured; Carlos ends up losing his spleen and one of his kidneys. As soon as he gets the news, Carlos’ brother, Francisco, a pianist in New York, charters a plane to fly himself and his wife, Angie, to Briones, just east of California’s Bay Area, stopping along the way to pick up Estelle and her husband, Dr. Francis Guzman. Working together, detectives from the Contra Costa Sheriff’s Department and the Briones Police Department unearth some dismaying news: The truck that hit the bicyclists backed up and hit them again. Far from her New Mexico comfort zone, Estelle has no official standing in the case. But she’s given a nametag identifying her as an official police consultant and allowed to ride along with variously congenial officers from both forces as they attempt to trace the movements of the truck, which construction worker James Patrick Wayne loaned his former brother-in-law Stanley Wilke just before it was stolen. The fact that Wilke worked for Todd Stringer in Crosby Cycle Sports, the shop that sold Carlos the bicycle built for two, confirms Estelle’s conviction that this accident was no accident. But which of the suspects linked by jealousy or lust to Carlos and Tasha was behind the wheel?

It’s nice to see the heroine creating family feeling far from home, but the climactic revelation is deeply anticlimactic.