Colin stripped to his boxer briefs and joined Meg in bed. After leaning over and kissing her shoulder, he grabbed his own book from the nightstand. It was a novel, but although he was enjoying it, he wasn’t reading it for pleasure.

He looked at the cover again.

The Broken Child by J. L. Sharp.

He’d never heard of the author before a couple weeks ago, though that wasn’t unusual, considering he didn’t pick up a whole lot of books, and when he did, they were usually of the true-crime variety. But he had to admit Sharp’s books were well written, intriguing, and not too full of flowery descriptions. Colin hated flowery descriptions.

In fact, Sharp’s writing was so well honed that Colin had torn through her first two books in a week before starting The Broken Child a couple of days ago. Each book centered on a female protagonist, Detective Jenna Black, who investigated cold-case files in Missouri, cases most often involving children.

The reason for this recent literary quest was that J. L. Sharp was the pen name for Rose Yates, a thirty-seven-year-old ex-Milwaukee resident and recent widow. Her husband, Riley McKay, had recently OD’d on alcohol and sleep medication. The coroner’s report didn’t rule it a suicide but rather an accidental overdose. Colin wasn’t so sure; Riley McKay’s toxicity levels suggested he must have had significant trouble sleeping to ingest as much as he had.

The Yates case was a small one for the Milwaukee PD and one that Colin, as a member of the Special Investigations Unit, would normally never have seen. But Riley McKay died right as the assigned detective, Bertram Cooper, was about to retire. Cooper worked the case for a week but his retirement day came before the case was closed out. Colin, with the least seniority in his new department, was told to deal with it. Put the case to bed, his sergeant had said.

Colin assumed it would be a matter of routine paperwork, but it hadn’t taken long before he had questions.

Why was there no extensive interview with the wife?

Why wasn’t the doctor who prescribed the meds consulted?

Why were there no notes about the family dynamic, any notes of mental illness or depression history, or observations from friends or family about the relationship between Riley McKay and Rose Yates?

The likely answer to all these questions was because Detective Cooper, on his way out, had seen the Riley McKay death as a simple overdose, perhaps suicide, and nothing more. Maybe in his anticipation of sailing the world or doing whatever he had planned, Cooper had been a little sloppy with the McKay case. Or, perhaps, he was just a mediocre detective.

Colin had planned to talk to Rose Yates, only to find she and her son moved to New Hampshire just a few weeks after her husband died. A little town called Bury.

Then, when Colin had discovered Rose Yates wrote novels about detectives, that piqued his interest, so he’d bought her first three books and read them. He hadn’t known what, exactly, he was looking for in these books but figured he’d know when he found it. He’d read through the first two books with interest, but it was the third book that grabbed him. One chapter in particular.