What the Fog Conceals

Retired criminologist Helen Voss-Carney and her husband Mike - twenty-eight years a Boston homicide detective - didn't come to Asheville looking for a case.

They came for the mountain air, the misty overlooks, and a few slow weeks in Eleanor, their beloved motorhome, before moving on.

Then a young potter named Emily Vance turns up dead, and the file is closed almost before it's opened: suicide, straightforward, no further questions. Except Helen reads the note left behind, and something about it doesn't sit right - not the words exactly, but the shape of them.

What starts as an idle observation over morning coffee becomes something neither of them can walk away from. A ceramics studio full of people who all have something to protect. A medical examiner under pressure to sign off quickly. A detective with more cases than time. And a second note - then a third - each one echoing the last in ways too precise to be coincidence.

Helen has spent her career teaching students not to see patterns that aren't there. But the harder she works to stay honest about what the evidence actually proves, the more it starts to look like Emily Vance's death isn't the end of anything. It might only be where someone else's story becomes visible.

In these mountains, the fog rolls in every evening. Some things it hides by accident. Others are hidden on purpose - and Helen and Mike are about to find out which is which.

What the Fog Conceals is Book Two in The Motorhome Murders, following a retired couple who can't quite leave the job behind, one national park at a time.