SummaryNew York Times bestselling author Mariah Stewart
crafts compelling stories of romantic suspense, full of
richly imagined characters, dazzling plot twists, and
breathless action that keeps the pages turning. Now Stewart
begins a thrilling new series—with a novel that proves
to be her biggest and boldest yet.
On a balmy spring evening, four high school
seniors—three boys and a girl—enter a park in the
small Pennsylvania city of Conroy. The next morning, two of
the boys are found shot to death, and the girl and the third
boy are gone. After three weeks with no leads and no sign of
either of the two missing teenagers, the chief of police
begins to wonder if they too were victims. But with no other
suspects, the authorities conclude that one of these kids
was the shooter.
The missing boy's grandmother, a secretary at the local
parish church, maintains his innocence. On her behalf, the
parish priest, Father Kevin Burch, hires former detective
Mallory Russo as a private investigator to figure out what
happened in the park that night. Mallory had ended her
nine-year stint with the Conroy police force some time ago
after becoming a target of a smear campaign. Now a
true-crime author, Mallory is surprised to receive the
priest's offer—and highly intrigued by the case. She
can't help but accept the challenge—especially when she
learns that her investigation will be financed by Father
Burch's cousin the reclusive billionaire Robert Magellan, a
man whose own wife and infant son disappeared without a
trace a year ago, a man who understands the heartache of not
knowing what happened to a loved one.
Detective Charlie Wanamaker is facing another sort of
tragedy. He fled Conroy years ago with no plans to return to
what he considered a dying factory town—until a family
emergency brought him back. Finding the situation much worse
than he'd thought, he trades his job as a big-city detective
for one with the Conroy police department. Assigned to the
park shooting case, Charlie quickly realizes that the
initial investigation left a lot of questions unanswered.
Unofficially, he teams up with Mallory to uncover the truth
and find the two kids, dead or alive. What Charlie and
Mallory discover will take them down a twisted path that
leads to an old unsolved murder—and justice for a
killer with a heart of stone.
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