The morning after the Vintage Mast & Hull Society’s regatta, a woman nobody at the club recognizes turns up dead aboard Pace McMorris’s sailboat, The Drowned Duck. Pace, club treasurer, proud boat owner, and the Oakland police department’s fastest available suspect, hires Summers Rose Investigations before the police finish their first pass at the scene, because he’s certain of exactly one thing: he didn’t do it.What follows is the most tangled case Cat Summers and Max Rose have run yet. The marina is full of people hiding things that have nothing to do with the murder: an identity thief with an entire fabricated past; a widow concealing an old crime of her own; a lawyer obscuring where his clients’ money actually went. Untangling their secrets from the killer’s takes every bit of the team’s combined skill. It also takes a level of trust the team extends, almost without noticing, to someone who’s spent the whole investigation making sure they extend it.Sandra Ruffini keeps Summers Rose Investigations solvent and the client’s expectations grounded in reality. Dean, the team’s newest addition, proves he’s earned his place in ways nobody, least of all Dean, expected. And Max Rose falls for exactly the wrong person, at exactly the wrong time, in exactly the worst case to have let it happen in.By the time the pieces line up, an innocent man has already been arrested, real danger has already reached the investigators themselves, and Max has to decide, fast, and mostly alone, what he’s willing to risk to learn the truth about someone he never should have trusted as much as he did.What he finds waiting for him is not a confession. It’s a woman who stops pretending the moment pretending stops working: cold, controlled, and entirely unapologetic. A fight for his own life ensues that the rest of the team isn’t there to see. Getting out of it depends on someone else on the team having quietly decided, on instinct alone, not to let Max go anywhere by himself that night.Soft-boiled, sharp-witted, and genuinely dangerous exactly when it needs to be: the fourth case for Summers Rose Investigations proves the team’s found-family warmth can survive betrayal from somewhere they never thought to look for it. Read more
