SHADOW RIDGE

A veteran Colorado cop faces the glass ceiling and a series of roadblocks in her first recorded case.

No woman in the Echo Valley Police Department has ever been promoted past the rank of detective—certainly not Jo Wyatt, who’s just been passed over for promotion to sergeant in favor of Cameron Finch, a considerably less experienced officer who also happens to be the husband from whom she’s quietly estranged. When Quinn Kirkwood finds college classmate Tye Horton, who has diabetes, shot to death in his garage apartment, Jo can’t help wondering whether his suicide is actually murder: “Why would a man shoot himself if you could overdose on insulin?” But Echo Valley Police Chief Grimes won’t hear a word about it, so Jo and her mentor-turned-partner, Squint MacAllister, are left on their own. Tye’s senior project, an innovative video game he was developing with Quinn and Ronny Buck, leads Jo to question everyone from professor Frederick Lucas, the instructor who’d tried to steal one of Tye’s earlier projects, to Ronny’s wealthy, powerful father, Xavier Buck, to District Attorney Zachary Walsenberg, whose son, Derek, killed himself a year ago while he was reviewing an earlier version of Tye’s game and whose wife, Alice, was Tye’s landlady. None of them takes any more kindly than Chief Grimes to Jo’s theories, and all of them carry a lot more clout than her. Not surprisingly, retired police captain Browning—who's previously written as Micki Browning—is best on Jo’s professional frustration with a department that values her labors as long as she doesn’t step out of line.

Thoroughly workmanlike, if not terribly original or surprising.