Seattle Detective Tracy Crosswhite, bounced from Violent Crimes to the Cold Case Unit, is presented with a case that ticks both boxes and then some. Anita Childress comes to Tracy with what might seem a perfectly reasonable request to find her mother. The complication is that Lisa Childress, an investigative reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, vanished 24 years ago, when Anita was two years old, and has long been presumed as dead as the paper she worked for. But Anita is convinced the cops never treated her mother's disappearance as seriously as they should have, and Tracy soon comes to agree with her. Moss Gunderson, the lead detective on the case, was so determined to pin Lisa's murder on her husband, Larry Childress, who came into a fat life insurance settlement he badly needed, that he never looked at any of the stories Lisa had been working on: There was a former Seattle mayor who seemed to have been running a pay to play scheme, a city councilman alleged to have molested minors, a police task force accused of skimming money from drug busts. One of these stories leads Tracy down a rabbit hole that's grown even murkier since Lisa fell off the face of the earth. As Tracy's frustration with often literal dead ends concerning crimes committed a quarter-century ago mounts, she gets a wholly unexpected break: A Facebook tip page she's set up produces a report that suggests that Lisa is still alive, living with amnesia a thousand miles away. The prospect of returning her to the family she's forgotten promises to be rocky but not nearly as rocky as the professional implications for Tracy herself. A deep dive that manages to be both grueling and masterful. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Bestseller Dugoni's first-rate ninth police procedural featuring Tracy Crosswhite (after 2021's In Her Tracks) hands the Seattle homicide detective a cold case with threatening professional and personal implications. Twenty-five years earlier, newspaper reporter Lisa Childress vanished after going to meet an anonymous informant in a deserted parking lot. Now, Tracy is approached by Lisa's daughter with a plea to look into the files again. Tracy, moved by her devotion to her own family, accepts the daunting task of finding the missing woman. When Tracy examines the cases Lisa was investigating, she becomes increasingly uneasy at how the criminal activities of a rogue unit of the police could connect with Tracy's own dearest friends and most trusted mentors in the department. Even when the mystery of Lisa's disappearance is miraculously resolved, it's clear that no one is going to come out of this investigation untested or unscathed. Dugoni convincingly details Tracy's methodical but creative approach to this tangle of guilt and denial, as well as showing her empathy for the people involved. Readers will eagerly await Tracy's next outing. Agents: Rebecca Scherer and Meg Ruley, Jane Rotrosen Agency. (Aug.)