Book one in the Oliver and Vasquez Series
It had been hard not to assume the midnight call dispatching Kathryn Oliver to the Santa Marcel Intermodal Rail Facility was some sort of prank from her Chief or worse, an informal departmental hazing ritual for the newly minted Detective the very evening she’d been celebrating her promotion with friends. Hauling herself out to the edge of the city in the middle of the night is the last thing Kate wants to do, especially when it means poking around shipping containers looking for whoever called in the tip to the human trafficking hotline. Finding two dozen women and children recently freed from a locked trailer should have been a win for the forces of good, but the gruesome body discovered among them — and the shadowy form glimpsed escaping the scene — changes the focus of Kate’s investigation. Despite the immigrants’ insistence that the strange figure is no threat — and is in fact, an ally — Kate nonetheless becomes fixated on tracking down what she considers to be her best suspect for the killing.
The leads are thin, but one takes her to the offices of Vasquez Industries and an unexpected reunion with the high school boyfriend who dumped her at the Senior Prom. Blinded by the searing pain he awakens deep within her soul, Kate eschews the offer of assistance the powerful shipping magnate could provide and resolves to soldier on alone. It’s not long before she realizes burying herself in the case buys her little comfort from the memories of another time she can no longer ignore.
When Kate’s chief suspect unexpectedly alights on her garden wall bearing an explanation more appropriate to ancient Mesoamerican civilizations than modern Southern California, the entire case takes on an urgency she never expected. Short on clues and under pressure from her Chief to make progress, Kate reluctantly joins forces with the masked vigilante in the hopes of tying him to the murders — and instead finds herself pulled into a world where the lines between reality and mythology are irrevocably blurred.
Coming in late 2024