UNDER COVER OF DARKNESS

Grippando’s latest lawyer-in-distress yarn asks what happened to the missing wife of a successful attorney, and comes up with an answer beyond your wildest dreams.

Gus Wheatley’s wife Beth didn’t pick up their preteen daughter Morgan from her big-ticket school for the best reason in the world: Beth had vanished—without packing her bags, taking her car, or touching her bank account. The Seattle cops, joined by the FBI, fear that she’s the latest victim of a serial killer whose first two victims were graying 51-year-old divorcées who both drove Ford pickups, and whose third victim looked an awful lot like Beth. And as Gus, held at arm’s length by the partners whose firm he’d been managing before Beth’s vanishing act brought up the abuse complaint she’d briefly entered against him years earlier, takes his first close look in years at the stranger who’d shared his bed, what he finds is unnerving. Beth had suffered from bouts of bulimia and shoplifting she kept from her husband, though she confided every last detail to his sister Carla. What other secrets had she been hiding? And what to make of clues that suggest she’s still alive and maybe even conspiring with the still-active killer? Unhappy with the inconclusive reports of FBI profiler Victoria Santos (The Informant, 1996), Gus decides to offer a fat reward for information about Beth’s whereabouts, and the convict who claims the bounty dangles a single clue that links Beth to a nefarious cult, whose appearance sends all credibility from whooshing from the tale like air from a punctured balloon. FBI agent Andrea Henning’s climactic infiltration of the sect answers every question about Beth’s disappearance and the trail of murder surrounding it except one: who could possibly believe this stuff?

An ingeniously entertaining mess for readers who won’t mind the way the case soars off the rails, or who just plain don’t like cults.