The Ridge at Bellefleur

When a hospice nurse calls the Washington State Patrol's cold-case unit on behalf of a dying man, Detective Sergeant Maren Halsey-Okoye learns that Mikiel Soren-Apakoro has been holding a memory for nineteen years, waiting for someone who would write it down. The memory concerns Audra Vesterberg-Choate, a fifteen-year-old who vanished from the small Ferry County town of Bellefleur on August 4, 2007.
The original investigation went cold within a year. Now, with a name, a week, and a job, Maren drives east across Washington State to a ridge town on the edge of the Colville Indian Reservation, where institutional protocols have improved, databases have expanded, and a case abandoned in 2007 may finally be reopened. What unfolds is a careful investigation into how small towns hold their secrets, how institutions fail when they do not coordinate, and how one detective's persistence, matched against a mother's nineteen years of waiting, can bring long-buried evidence into the light.
The Ridge at Bellefleur is a novel about the quiet work of cold-case investigation, the people who carry burdens until they can place them in another's hands, and the reason some mysteries yield to patience and institutional care.