Fans of Steven F. Havill's Posadas County and Lisa Regan's Josie Quinn series will enjoy this fascinating and complex story set in small-town Missouri. " Balances well-developed characters and dry humor with a solid police procedural"- Library Journal Starred Review of Dangerous Consequences Branson Sheriff Hank Worth is one of the first on the scene of a mass casualty incident - a local fireworks warehouse has exploded, killing everyone inside. As over a dozen victims are pulled from the smoldering ruins, the painstaking identification process begins. Chief Deputy Sheila Turley returns early from medical leave to assist in the office, while Hank delves deeper into the increasingly complicated situation at the morgue. He discovers that the previous forensic pathologist was hasty at best and negligent at worst. What starts as an offhand request to look into the errors turns into a discovery that shakes Hank's world off its axis . . . With Hank secretly investigating his discovery at the morgue, his short-handed team is stretched to the brink as it investigates the cause of the explosion. Then a shocking revelation leaves Sheila and her fellow deputies scrambling for answers to an unexpected crime. Just what happened in the warehouse in the moments before the blast? Can they unravel the mysteries in time to save Branson from yet more heartbreak? And can Hank, adrift and alone, figure out what happened before it destroys everything he holds dear?
Author
Claire Booth is a journalist and author who has written about crime for decades. She’s covered everything from the theft of the Aston Martin used in the James Bond film Goldfinger to the Laci Peterson murder and the San Francisco dog mauling case, where two lawyers were convicted of killing their neighbor with vicious dogs they kept for an imprisoned friend. She also covered the case of Taylor Helzer, a Northern California man who convinced two followers he was a prophet of God. In order to raise money for their end-of-days scheme, the group extorted money from a retired couple and then killed them and three others to cover their tracks. The tremendously complicated quintuple murder case is the basis for her first book, the non-fiction The False Prophet: Conspiracy, Extortion and Murder in the Name of God. After living with that case for so long, Claire decided she’d had enough of the real world and turned to fiction. Her first novel, The Branson Beauty, features county sheriff Hank Worth. The second in the series is Another Man’s Ground and the third, A Deadly Turn, comes out March 1, 2019.
