The Last Place

In hot legal water — and court-ordered therapy — for
having assaulted a potential child molester Tess Monaghan
is more than ready for a distraction. So she agrees to
look into a series of unsolved homicides that date back
over the past six years despite the fact that the
assignment originates in part from a most troubling
source: wealthy Baltimore benefactor Luisa ONeal who was
both instrumental in launching Tesss present career and
intimately connected with the murder of Tesss former
boyfriend. There are other troubling aspects as well.
Apart from the suspicion that each death was the result of
domestic violence nothing else seems to connect them Five
lives — those of four women and one man — were destroyed
by fire gunshot and hit-and-run and all five cases have
gone ice cold. Though Luisas nonprofit organization hires
Tess simply to review old police documents for
inconsistencies and investigative blunders curiosity is
soon leading the P.I. off the paper trail. And it just may
get her killed. Tesss search for connecting threads takes
her beyond the Charm City limits and into dangerously
unfamiliar territory. With the help of a police officer
obsessed with bringing a murderer down she follows scant
leads and intuition into the remotest corners of Maryland
where a psychopath can hide as easily in the fabric of a
tiny rough-hewn fishing community as in the alleys and
shadows of bustling Baltimore. Straying far from
everything thats familiar and safe in her life Tess is
suddenly cast into a terrifying cat-and-mouse game with an
ingenious slayer who changes identities as often and
effortlessly as clothing. Because a single common link to
five senseless murders is beginning to emerge with
shocking clarity to tie the looseends together into one
bloody knot…and the link is Tess Monaghan herself.