Silence Has a Price

When Franklin Wren, the wealthiest man in Cedar Hollow, is found murdered in his locked study on the night of the town's biggest celebration, former Boston homicide detective Sarah Blackwood is pulled back into a world she swore she'd left behind for good.

Sarah only came home to close out her late father's estate. She never meant to stay. But when she's the one who finds the body, and the local sheriff moves to arrest the town's most convenient scapegoat within hours, her instincts - the ones eleven years on the force never quite let her forget, refuse to let it go. The evidence is too clear. The story closes too fast. And everyone in Cedar Hollow, it seems, has a reason to want this case shut before it's properly opened.

As Sarah digs deeper, she uncovers a web of secrets far older and far darker than a single night's violence: a charitable trust bleeding money into a shell company, a grieving widow with a double life, a desperate son drowning in debt, and a bookkeeper too frightened to say what he knows out loud, until it's too late. Every answer she finds only raises more dangerous questions, and every person she trusts might be the one lying to her face.

At the center of it all is a twenty-two-year-old tragedy this town buried so deep that even its own sheriff believed it would never resurface, until a dead man's unfinished letter threatened to drag it back into the light. Now Sarah must decide how far she's willing to go, and who she's willing to risk, to finally give a silenced town its voice back, before the person protecting that secret decides she's the next one who needs to disappear.

Told with the slow-burning suspense of a classic whodunit and the propulsive tension of a modern courtroom thriller, Silence Has a Price is a nail-biting small-town murder mystery about the debts we never stop paying, the neighbors we never really know, and the terrible cost of a secret worth killing for.

Perfect for readers who love:

• Small-town murder mysteries with twist endings
• Strong female detective and amateur sleuth fiction
• Slow-burn psychological suspense and crime thrillers
• Character-driven whodunits in the tradition of classic mystery fiction

If you love unraveling a case one clue at a time, meeting suspects who all seem to be hiding something, and racing toward a final twist you won't see coming, Silence Has a Price will keep you turning pages long past midnight.

Some secrets are buried for decades. Some are worth killing to protect. And in Cedar Hollow, silence always, always has a price.