Part of Quinn & Costa
First published 2023
For three years, bodies have been surfacing in the bayou outside St. Augustine, Louisiana. Each one belonged to a woman nobody powerful wanted found. Local detective Beau Hebert has been working the cases alone, and every time he gets close, witnesses go quiet and his own department shuts him down. The corruption runs straight through the badge. Out of options, Beau calls in his contact at the FBI's Mobile Response Team. LAPD detective Kara Quinn goes undercover in St. Augustine, moving through the town's tight social fabric to find out who these women were and who wanted them dead. Team leader Matt Costa takes the official angle, investigating the in-custody death of a witness whose silence came at a convenient moment. St. Augustine is the kind of place where everybody knows everybody, which means everybody also knows what not to say. The deeper Kara and the team dig, the clearer it becomes that this is not a local problem with a local solution. A drug-trafficking operation connects St. Augustine to something much larger. Beau has been fighting for these seven women on his own. Now he has backup. But in a town built on buried secrets, that might not be enough.
Genres: suspense, mystery, crime, adult-fiction, thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, fast-paced, gritty, suspenseful
Tropes: forced-proximity, found-family, uncovering-secrets
Setting: St. Augustine, Louisiana, Bayou, LAPD
Period: Contemporary
352 pages · Kindle Edition · MIRA
Content warnings: murder, trafficking, violence