"If you like strong characterizations, great dialogue and surprises, Pulitzer-nominee Lawrence De Maria's Alton Rhode mysteries are in a class by themselves." - JOHN CRUDELE (New York Post)"A master of thriller dialogue." (WASHINGTON INDEPENDENT REVIEW OF BOOKS); "While De Maria may have been an award-winning financial reporter, he's an awfully good fiction writer as well." (NAPLES DAILY NEWS); "What is really almost beyond belief is how easily De Maria has transitioned from the dry world of financial reporting to the wild and lavish world of novel writing." (COLLIER CITIZEN)***Alton Rhode is feeling a bit lonely - and depressed. Just about everyone he knows, including his girlfriend, is out of town. Then, Laurene Robillard walks into his office.At first, he does not recognize the beautiful, mature woman. She has changed dramatically since posing as a dying waif years earlier as part of a plot that almost cost Rhode his life. The former hooker is now respectable, very rich and soon to be married. But she needs Rhode's help. Someone has killed her grandfather, Colver Elson, a man with whom she has just reconnected after tracking down her birth mother in Atlas, Virginia. The private eye heads south, where he soon discovers that the murder of Elson, a prominent judge, is not the only evil lurking in the small Virginia town. With two brutish killers straight out of "Deliverance" on his tail, Rhode accepts help from someone even tougher than he is, and the bodies start to pile up.Winner of an Associated Press award for crime reporting, Lawrence De Maria later cut his teeth on financial corruption at The New York Times and Forbes.
