Ground Truth: A Sam Shaw Mystery-Book Three

The map says field. Put your boots down, and it's a grave. Ground truth: what surveyors call the real thing - the measurement you take by standing on the actual spot, because the tidy view from above always lies. Sam Shaw has built a career, and a movement, on that single idea. Now an old man in a wheelchair points her toward an unremarkable patch of Hill Country and tells her to look - and what the ground gives back is far bigger than one death. It's a pattern decades deep: the quiet, the vanished, the "moved away," every one of them near water, every one followed by someone else's sudden good fortune. Naming even one of them out loud could get Sam killed. She won't be doing it alone. Reid Callahan has stopped pretending this is only a case - and when the danger turns real and he puts himself between Sam and it, something two careful people have been denying for two years finally refuses to stay buried. Book Three of the Sam Shaw Mysteries - where the slow burn catches.