SECRETS

Retired police officers Naomi Blake and Alec Friedman’s house hunting is interrupted by a mysterious stranger’s suicide.

Ever since a crazed killer tried to burn Naomi to death (Night Vision, 2012), their house has had too many bad memories. So she and Alec sell and travel across England looking for someplace new to settle. They have few family ties, but Alec maintains an attachment to elderly Molly Chambers, who spent years traveling the globe with her husband, Edward, a Foreign Service officer. When a strange man who’s broken into “Aunt” Molly’s house brandishing a pistol blows his brains out on the second-floor landing, Alec agrees to help local police find out why. But Molly repeatedly stonewalls. Alec knows she’s hiding something. And he knows that her secrets are rooted in the dark time she spent in the Congo, when Molly and Edward were forced to flee rebel forces during the country’s brutal civil war. But how are the war, the death of Edward’s translator, Adis, the fate of a handful of children Molly rescued from the rebels and the file Molly keeps secreted in a storage facility connected to a man who breaks into her home to kill not her but himself?

Adams’ latest adventure for Blake and Friedman spins a puzzle so convoluted that even she can’t seem to solve it.