Strong bonds of family and friendship

Lake Superior, Duluth. The last thing that dying dr. Steve says to his life-long best friend police-chief Jonathan Stride is that he buried the body that (he thinks that) Jonathan killed and that nobody knows about it. Stride knows that he didn’t kill anybody but he has a good idea about the identity of the victim. In his garden, they find the body of Ned Baer, a journalist who disappeared 7 years earlier. Stride was the last man, to see him alive. The journalist came to town to find the woman that anonymously accused politician Devin Card of raping her when she was 17, a woman that did not want to be found. We learn early in the book that this woman is Andrea, Stride’s ex-wife. Did she kill the journalist herself, did Ned kill him to protect her anonymity, or did the politician kill him to get rid of the whole story? As Stride is a suspect in this case because he lied back then about certain aspects and refuses to talk now apart from swearing that he’s innocent, he’s suspended for the time of the inquest. His old enemy Dan Erickson leads the investigation and he would love nothing better than finding Stride guilty. There’s also a second case that clouds the family life of the Stride family even more. Cat, the runaway teenager that lives with Jonathan and Serena, receives weird notes and photos of herself that prove that she’s being stalked. Things get from bad to worse and she’s allocated a police bodyguard. The story starts out really slow and as the suspense builds up, it gains momentum and cannot be stopped anymore. You fall from 1 surprise into the next. There are so many twists and turns that I can’t put a number on them. And when you think that you’ve solved the case, there’s yet another new element that changes the picture again. It’s a shame that I haven’t found this series earlier on. This is number 10 already and there are several references to things that happened in the past and even though this story depends hugely on this past, it’s perfectly possible to read and enjoy this book without having read the others. I advise to read them in order as I think it will increase your pleasure. The story alternates constantly between both storylines and even though both cases have nothing to do with each other apart from both involving the Stride extended family, somehow Freeman manages to bring them together in the end. I thank Blackstone Publishing and Netgalley for providing me with a free ARC; this is my unbiased and honest review of it.