A women is walking around a lake on a freezing day. Suddenly, she is knocked down, her head forced into the mud.
Officer Lena Adams is investigating a report of a suicide at the lake. The police have found a pair of shoes on the shore and a note that says, “I want it over.” Eventually, they pull up the body of a woman who has been weighed down with cement bricks and chains.
Her ID says she is Allison Spooner, a student at the nearby campus. The death is possibly a suicide, but she was stabbed in the back of the neck, which would almost be impossible to do to yourself.
With an officer dispatched to the girl’s home, Lena and her boss, Frank Wallace, go there to continue the investigation. Lena can tell that Frank has been drinking, and when the police find a young man in the garage listed as Allison’s address, the situation is bungled, resulting in the stabbing of Brad, a young officer, and injuries to both Lena and Frank.
Dr. Sara Linton now enters the story. She has returned home for Thanksgiving for the first time since her husband Jeffrey’s death. She blames Lena, who was Jeffrey’s partner, for the death. The first evening, Frank calls to ask her to come to the jail because Tommy Braham has been arrested for murder and he is hysterical. Sara vaguely remembers Tommy as a cheerful boy of limited intelligence, but this is oddly the second call she has received about Tommy. When she gets to the jail, she finds Tommy is dead, having cut his wrists using a pen refill cartridge.
Will Trent has had his holiday leave canceled so that he can investigate the custody death. He finds a sullen crew of small-town police who are not at all cooperative. Lena has wanted to admit to the mistakes she made at both the arrest and custody sites, but she has been threatened by Frank to follow the story he’s made up.
Very quickly Will finds problems with the small-town team’s theory of the crime. They think Tommy killed Allison in her garage apartment and took her to the lake, but Will quickly finds the crime scene at the lake and also discovers that Tommy was in his own home when they arrested him.
I can see where the relationship is going between Will and Sara, and I’m not that happy about it. Sara was apparently a major figure in a previous series by Slaughter, and Slaughter has brought her into this series. Perhaps it’s because I like Angie, Will’s long-time love, from the TV series. I don’t see her as the negative figure Slaughter seems to be making her. Same with Lena, since I don’t know what she did in the previous series.
What? Me Read? 