Annie has fallen out of the habit of listening to her husband. She and Paul have been married for a long time; it's easy to nod as he drones on, responding to his voice while completely ignoring every word he says. That becomes a problem, of course, when Paul disappears and the police have questions. Was Paul having issues at work? Is there any reason to think he might harm himself? Annie doesn't know. But someone does. An unsettling photo found amongst Paul's things turns the investigation toward his job as a middle-school teacher and a troubled girl who is hiding secrets of her own. But what exactly happened to Paul on the day he left for work and never made it to the classroom? Is his disappearance related to a local heroin-trafficking operation? As Eddie Mahler and the members of the Santa Rosa Violent Crime Investigations Team rush to find him, they discover that members of his family have hidden lives of their own and that Paul may not have been running away but toward something that could ruin his career and marriage-and even cost his life.
When a young woman is found strangled to death and left on a park bench in Santa Rosa, California, Detective Eddie Mahler and his Violent Crime Investigations (VCI) Team are called to the scene. The crime immediately flashes Mahler back to two unsolved homicides?young women who were also strangled?that took place at this same location a couple of years earlier. His inability to find evidence against the man he knows was responsible for their deaths has haunted him since.Now suffering from chronic migraines that affect his vision, Mahler has secretly lost faith in the investigation process and must rely more than ever on his team. Its newest member, Eden Somers, is a former FBI analyst whose ability to completely immerse herself in the evidence of a case proves both a gift and a curse. While Eden dives deep into the cold-case evidence, the rest of the team chase leads to identify the latest victim and discover that her death might be the work of a different killer altogether. Now Mahler and his team are fighting to solve both these mysteries before anyone else is silenced.
