by Tami Hoag
First published 2013
Detective Sam Kovac has seen countless corpses throughout his career, but nothing prepares him for what tumbles from a car trunk on New Year's Eve in Minneapolis. A young woman's battered body spills onto the icy pavement in front of oncoming traffic. The victim becomes known as Zombie Doe because investigators cannot determine if she was alive or dead when she hit the street. She is the ninth unidentified female victim of the year, and Kovac and his partner Nikki Liska must discover both her identity and her killer. The detectives fear she may be the latest victim of Doc Holiday, a serial killer who crosses state lines and dumps bodies on holidays. But as Kovac and Liska dig deeper into the case, they uncover evidence that the true monsters in this woman's life lived much closer to home. With another young woman missing, the partners race against time while confronting a terrible question about the nature of evil.
Genres: mystery, crime, thriller, detective
Vibes: dark, fast-paced, suspenseful
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, race-against-time
Setting: Minneapolis
Period: New Year's Eve
405 pages · Hardcover · Dutton
Content warnings: murder, violence