illiams, find a dead man on the frozen ground amid the stark metal sculptures in a park on the edge of Detroit City University campus. The discovery of the man’s naked body that winter morning ratchets up pressure on a department already roiling with recent scandal, post-pandemic tensions and the maddening elusiveness of a thief on a bicycle targeting students.

Fran is coping with her own turmoil, forced by her husband’s affair to return to police work after years of being a stay-at-home mom. At home, she deals with children struggling with their father’s abandonment; at work, she is forced to navigate the department’s rampant misogyny and a sergeant determined to see her fail.

Fran vows to solve the campus mystery to prove she isn’t the pity hire that her peers believe her to be. However, when the killer breaks into her home, more victims die and the dead man is linked to the DCU PD and to a horrific crime buried in the past, Fran feels caught in the cross-hairs of a killer spiraling out of control.

Could it be someone inside the department? Fran doesn’t know whom to trust, but she does know that she must find the killer no longer as a point of pride but to save her family. Author Val Dutton worked briefly as a former police dispatcher in a high-crime area.

She has worked as an ad copywriter and as a reporter for a suburban newspaper and was even a suicide hot-line counselor. After taking time off to raise a family, she's back at work as a full-time copy editor for a large production house.

But Val is always working on a writing project or two, as well. She's the author of four e-book romances and the cookbook, "50+1 Weird Recipes: Dare to Try Them All!" Although she has lived in a number of places, from England to DC, she now lives with her writer husband, Ron Torrence, and their mischievous miniature poodle, Delilah, both Downriver, Michigan, and on the shores of Lake Erie, Pennsylvania.

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