"The arrival of a celebrity athlete on a remote peninsula in New York's Thousand Islands unearths dark and deadly buried secrets in this heart-pounding blend of suspense and mystery, the first in the new North Country series—Agatha Christie meets Ruth Ware and Lucy Foley
It's almost summer in Cape Vincent, and ex-professional ice hockey superstar Mikko Helle arrives, ready to move into his extravagantly renovated waterfront home. Mikko is thirty, handsome, and wealthy. He's a stranger in town. There's no reason to suspect Mikko is anything other than he seems.
Local married mother-of-two Nicole Durham works her connections hard to get hired as his cleaner. She needs this job—and not just because of the money. Nicole is desperate to expose a secret, and she's running out of time.
But when Nicole disturbs an intruder while cleaning, New York State Police Investigator Tim Wellington discovers that the luxury mansion is hiding its own unthinkable truth. Deep in the basement lie the bones of a young woman, identity unknown.
The celebrity athlete. The local. The thief. Everyone is hiding something—but someone in the North Country's a killer, and one of the three knows exactly who it is."
"A missing tourist spells trouble for Senior Investigator Shana Merchant in this must-listen twisty mystery set in an atmospheric island community with a small-town vibe.
Former NYPD detective Shana Merchant is a skilled Senior Investigator keeping New York's beautiful Thousands Islands community safe. She's a loving partner. A strong woman. A survivor.
She's also bound by blood to a serial killer. And after months of concealing the truth from the world as she hunted Blake Bram down, her secret is finally out.
Shana just wants to get on with her life and win back her community's trust. But as Alexandria Bay fills up with tourists in advance of the annual festival known as Pirate Days, a visitor goes missing, and the case threatens to destroy not just the celebrations, but what remains of Shana's reputation.
Shana's not to blame for the killer in her family, but people are starting to whisper that she attracts trouble. That A-Bay was safer before she arrived. And as the investigation deepens, Shana starts to fear that they may be right.
Because while Bram is gone, he is far from forgotten."
"Senior Investigator Shana Merchant must dredge up dark secrets and old grudges if she's to solve the murder of a prominent local citizen in the Thousand Islands community she now calls home.
The body is discovered on Wolfe Island, under the shadow of an enormous wind turbine. Senior Investigator Shana Merchant, arriving on the scene with fellow investigator Tim Wellington, can't shake the feeling that she knows the victim—and the subsequent identification sends shockwaves through their community in the Thousand Islands of Upstate New York.
Politics, power, passion . . . there are dark undercurrents in Shana's new home, and finding the killer means dredging up her new friends and neighbors' old grudges and long-kept secrets.
That is, if the killer is from the community at all. For Shana's keeping a terrible secret of her own: eighteen months ago she escaped from serial killer Blake Bram's clutches. But has he followed her . . . to kill again?"
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