The spring snowmelt finally releases what the Loyalsock has been holding all winter - and what surfaces in the rushing water below Heron's Hollow is the body of Nadia Voss, a twenty-four-year-old graduate researcher who vanished five months ago and was assumed to have simply gone home. She hadn't. Detective Mara Calloway expected this case to be a quiet formality - a missing-person file finally, sadly, closed.
Instead, the laptop Nadia left behind at the Stag & Clover tells a different story: months of water-quality data showing a pattern of illegal discharge into the watershed, traced back to Crestline Aggregate, a quarrying operation that has spent six years building goodwill, political connections, and a reputation as untouchable as it is clean - on paper. As Mara follows the evidence from the creek to the boardroom, she uncovers a network of complicity that reaches further than she expected: an operations manager who knows exactly how far the law can be pushed before it breaks, an owner who never gets his own hands dirty, and a state representative whose one phone call may have set everything in motion.
For Eli, it's even more personal - Nadia was his niece, and her death reopens a rift with his brother that's been thirty years in the making. The river kept what it was given through an entire winter. Now it's giving it back - and Heron's Hollow will never look at its water, or each other, the same way again. book 4
The spring snowmelt finally releases what the Loyalsock has been holding all winter - and what surfaces in the rushing water below Heron's Hollow is the body of Nadia Voss, a twenty-four-year-old graduate researcher who vanished five months ago and was assumed to have simply gone home. She hadn't. Detective Mara Calloway expected this case to be a quiet formality - a missing-person file finally, sadly, closed.
Instead, the laptop Nadia left behind at the Stag & Clover tells a different story: months of water-quality data showing a pattern of illegal discharge into the watershed, traced back to Crestline Aggregate, a quarrying operation that has spent six years building goodwill, political connections, and a reputation as untouchable as it is clean - on paper. As Mara follows the evidence from the creek to the boardroom, she uncovers a network of complicity that reaches further than she expected: an operations manager who knows exactly how far the law can be pushed before it breaks, an owner who never gets his own hands dirty, and a state representative whose one phone call may have set everything in motion.
For Eli, it's even more personal - Nadia was his niece, and her death reopens a rift with his brother that's been thirty years in the making. The river kept what it was given through an entire winter. Now it's giving it back - and Heron's Hollow will never look at its water, or each other, the same way again. book 4