THE DEEPEST KILL

A pair of forensic scientists helps a tech titan investigate his daughter’s death.

Although their history as colleagues at the Locard Institute has been relatively brief, Dr. Ellie Carr and Dr. Rachael Davies have formed a bond that’s uncommonly close professionally while remaining more distant personally. That’s about to change. Martin Post, the genius behind OakTree software design, summons them to the Gulf Coast to help determine whether his four-months-pregnant daughter, Ashley, died in an accidental drowning or was the victim of something more sinister. When they arrive at his Florida home, a palatial compound befitting the third-richest man in the United States, the investigators find a living situation that would try the most robust family ties. Ashley and her husband, Greg Anderson, lived entirely under Martin’s domineering thumb. Solo excursions on her boat, Phantom, were Ashley’s main source of release. Local police believe that, perhaps due to a pregnancy-related loss of balance, she was swept off the Phantom and drowned. But when Rachael’s careful inspection of Ashley’s body, recovered from the Gulf days after her disappearance, reveals a tiny nick in her spine, she and Ellie realize that they’re looking at a murder. Meticulous Rachael and intuitive Ellie must answer a daunting number of questions about how Ashley came to be killed so many miles from land. The two investigators end up strengthening their personal connection as memories from Ellie’s past, including details of her own mother’s drowning, inflect their inquiry.

Nothing about this case makes sense until it does. Cheers for Black’s knotty puzzle and the two canny women who unravel it.