A trans detective working for the District Attorney’s Office takes on the twisty, poignant cold case murder of a local trans woman, and her investigation unravels the threads of a mystery that’s haunted her since she was a child: her mother’s disappearance.
When Lieutenant Lauren Kelly is exiled to the newly created Homicide Cold Case Unit at the DA’s office, she knows they’re sticking her there as punishment, hoping she does nothing for the next two years until she hits twenty-five years on the force and can quietly retire. That way, no one can claim they discriminated against the only trans detective in Donn County.
With her ex-detective father declining with Alzheimer’s, Lauren has a lot on her plate already—but with regards to the cold cases, she has other plans. She reopens the investigation into the death of Sherry Darling, a trans sex worker she went to high school with. As Lauren looks deeper into the events surrounding Sherry’s murder, she uncovers evidence of a cover up with implications beyond anything she could have ever imagined . . . and she becomes more and more convinced that what happened to Sherry is somehow tied to why her own mother disappeared when she was a child.
This brand new investigation from the acclaimed author of the Erin McCabe series is a nesting doll of pulse-pounding mysteries that dig deep into bias, corruption, and local scandal.