After the stand-alone of TRIPTYCH we're back in the more familiar part of Georgia called Grant County and the characters who make up the series that now numbers six and revolves around the lives and careers of paediatrician and medical examiner Dr Sara Linton, local Chief of Police Jeffrey Tolliver and his assistant Detective Lena Adams. Actually the majority of this tale takes place in a small Georgia town in Elawah County where Lena has got herself involved with swastika-tattooed crystal meth traders while she tries hard to reconstruct the life she was given to believe was her own and which mainly involves her `user' uncle Hank, her late parents, her late twin sister Sibyl and her now imprisoned ex-boyfriend Ethan. While Lena's mission forms the backbone to the story, it's really the relationship of Sara and Jeffrey that is right at the front of the reader's conscience as they attempt to find the missing Lena and help the local police track down the perpetrators of a number of horrific murders. The emphasis on Sara's love for her husband Jeffrey - slightly over-cooked throughout the novel - is eventually justified at the very end. Apart from one or two autopsies, when the writer always seems to shift into an altogether more professional and page-turning gear, on reflection this tale is really about Sara's love for Jeffrey, and to a lesser extent Lena's quest for the truth regarding her roots and upbringing. Compared to the other novels in this series, I would suggest that this is more of a romantic thriller than others which have focused rather more on acts of crime and the solving of them; in this tale the bad guys are almost always in the background and there is little in the way of justice or redemption. But just before I was about to complain about that, there was the most unexpected of endings, one which made most of what had gone before almost irrelevant, and it is that which will linger in my mind over the next few days. As a complete story it took a long while to get going, and to be honest I even considered giving up, but the pace picked up just in time about midway through, enough to carry things along to the explosive conclusion. I think it fair to say that it would be best to read the previous five novels in the series to get the greatest pleasure out of this latest one, as there is a heavy dependence upon knowing, understanding and caring for the three primary characters.