Silent Rain

March 13, 2017
Salvaggio’s nail-biting fourth Macy Greeley mystery (after 2016’s Walleye Junction) takes the Montana state detective to the college town of Bolton, where writer Peter Granger and his artist wife have died in a suspicious house fire. One suspect in the murder-arson is 20-year-old Grace Adams, a student at Bolton College with a troubled past. Grace wasn’t happy that Granger, a man she trusted, was planning to use her traumatic experiences as fodder for his next novel. There are plenty of other suspects besides Grace, since just about everyone in Bolton had reason to hate Granger, including his wife. Part of the fun of Salvaggio’s mysteries lies in the unexpected complexity of small-town relationships. She shatters every illusion of simplicity as Macy lays bare each person’s secrets in a series of interviews that artfully draws out the tension of an already powerful story. The severe weather on the Montana plains—from swirling snow to drenching rain—sets the somber mood. Agent: Felicity Blunt, Curtis Brown.

March 15, 2017
There are more tricks than treats when a quiet college town bursts into violence on Halloween.Grace Adams changed her surname to Larson before enrolling as an art major at a liberal arts college in Bolton. On Halloween she chooses another identity, Carrie, from Stephen King's eponymous horror novel, at a costume contest in a local bar. On a long, drunken walk home, she falls asleep on a stranger's lawn and awakens to the smell of a burning house--the nearby mansion belonging to bestselling author Peter Granger and his wife, Hannah. Grace had once been almost a member of the family, until Peter kicked her out of his writing workshop and Hannah stopped giving her painting lessons. Now she's a person of interest in the matter of the ruined mansion and the two burned bodies found in the conjugal bed. When Detective Macy Greeley, a special investigator for the Montana Department of Justice, is called in to supervise the case, not only does she know Bolton well from her college days, but she also has a history with Grace and knows better than almost anyone why Grace was so resentful of Peter for basing a crime novel on her traumatic past (Bone Dust White, 2014). As Macy interviews the Grangers' devoted personal assistant, as well as Hannah's lover, the evidence--revelations about Peter's manipulative relationships with the young female students in his workshop, a set of compromising photographs--indicates that the burned house was definitely arson and one of the corpses is Peter. Also missing is Grace's threatening letter to Peter, his laptop, the draft of his crime novel, and paintings worth millions. But the biggest question is not who killed Peter before setting his house on fire but who's the woman whose burned body was found next to his? Salvalaggio's fourth installment (Walleye Junction, 2016, etc.) lives up to her talent for dropping unhappy souls into grim circumstances and handing them over to her flawed but capable protagonist to save or arrest.

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March 15, 2017
Grace Adams took a new surname and moved to a new town after what happened to her years earlier, as told in Salvalaggio's debut, Bone Dust White (2014). But the relationship that sustained her most, with novelist Peter Granger and his artist wife, Hannah, crumbled when Grace learned that Peter was only after the story of her traumatic past so he could write about it. Feeling betrayed, Grace wrote an incendiary letter to him, a therapeutic exercise that she never intended to send. But when Peter and a woman die in a fire at his home, Grace is a suspect. Montana Department of Justice Special Investigator Macy Greeley, who knows Grace from working on the earlier case, is on the Granger investigation, which turns out to involve murder and arson and is complicated by a pending divorce, a violent stalker, and the manipulative use of female students. This is the fourth in a solid series, with a female crime fighter trying to balance her professional and personal lives.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)