First published 2015
Dr. Bill Bass drives up winding mountain roads to exhume a body that was buried twenty-seven years ago. The skeleton belongs to what everyone believes are the remains of Leoma Patterson, a 56-year-old woman who vanished from a Clinton, Tennessee bar in 1978. Six months after her disappearance, investigators found female bones on a wooded lakeshore. A daughter identified her mother's ring at the scene. The case seemed solved when a relative confessed to the murder six years later. But some family members never accepted the identification, which was made before DNA technology existed. Now Bass must extract genetic material from the old bones and determine whether science will confirm or overturn decades of assumptions. The forensic analysis pushes both DNA technology and Bass's fifty years of experience to their limits. What started as a routine identification becomes a test of how far forensic science can reach into the past to deliver truth to the living.
Genres: historical-fiction, mystery, crime, detective, academic
Vibes: atmospheric, emotional, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: amateur-sleuth, cold-case, forensic-investigation, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Clinton, Tennessee
Period: 1978, 2005
112 pages · Mass Market Paperback · William Morrow Paperbacks