DEEPER THAN THE DEAD

A metropolitan cop returns to her rural roots to uncover long-buried secrets and catch a dangerous killer.

Shortly after Vera Boyett’s career as deputy chief of the Memphis Police Department goes “down in flames,” she receives a dreaded but not unexpected call from the Fayetteville, Tennessee, farm where she grew up. The body of her stepmother, Sheree, who disappeared when Vera was a teenager decades ago, has finally been found. With Daddy Vernon ensconced in the memory care facility Hillside Manor and her own future uncertain, Vera can’t help returning home to her fragile younger sister, Eve, and their half sister, Luna. Because free-spirited Sheree had lived a fast life prominently featuring barhopping and drugs, no one suspected foul play when she first disappeared. Webb’s series kickoff ropes in readers by planting numerous seeds of suspicion in the here and now. New Fayetteville sheriff Gray “Bent” Benton may be stalking Vera. Vernon’s secrets are buried as deeply as his memory. The details of Vera’s departure from the Memphis force are initially only sketchily described. Most compellingly, Vera’s memories suggest her guilt over unspecified past dark deeds she and Eve committed. The action heats up when someone runs Eve off the road at the treacherous Dead Man’s Curve, multiple sets of remains are discovered, and Vera receives a series of menacing notes: “I should have killed you all when I had the chance.” Both the safety of her family and the restoration of the self-esteem damaged by Vera’s dismissal from the police depend on her ability to ferret out the serial killer.

A taut and gritty procedural with the promise of more.