CRIMSON LAKE ROAD

The last case between a federal prosecutor and the retirement she craves will take her to some truly harrowing places.

Four weeks after Kathy Pharr was sexually assaulted and beaten to death, police called to another house on Crimson Lake Road made a gruesome discovery with a surprise ending: Though, like Kathy, she’s draped in the trappings of one of 1960s Kenyan painter Sarpong’s four indelible pictures of death, yoga teacher Angela River isn’t quite dead herself. Even so, Cason Baldwin, of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, homicide detective Lucas Garrett of the Las Vegas Sheriff’s Office, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Jessica Yardley of the Special Victims Unit all treat Angela as a second victim of the monster that freelance reporter Jude Chance has dubbed the Crimson Lake Executioner. Since Kathy’s 14-year-old daughter, Harmony, went missing shortly after her mother was killed, the obvious suspect is Kathy’s husband, Tucker, who’s already served time for kidnapping Sue Ellen Jones 18 years ago. But Yardley’s growing friendship with Angela soon diverts her attention from Tucker Pharr to Angela’s live-in lover, ER physician Michael Zachary, and the evidence the police find in Zachary’s garage is as damning as the tone of Angela’s voice when she tells Yardley she never wants to see her again. Confronted in court by the unexpectedly resourceful Dylan Aster, who talks Zachary into accepting his representation and then sets himself resolutely against the presiding judge, Yardley’s forced to consult the expert on painting and serial murder she’d sworn never to see again: her ex-husband, Eddie Cal, who’s been imprisoned ever since sending 12 victims to their graves in A Killer’s Wife (2020).

Dark, darker, and then some. But readers who can take it are in for quite a ride.