Holmes Slaughterhouse Cases

She came to Montana for a fresh start. What she found was a body without a head.Detective Gwen Jarvi transfers from the Minneapolis homicide squad to Billings, Montana, hoping for a change of pace after a decade working the city's most brutal cases. She barely has time to unpack before she and her new partner Bob Jackson are standing over a headless, handless corpse dumped in an apartment complex garbage bin - unidentified, cold, and two days dead.No name. No fingerprints. No obvious motive.As Gwen traces a pair of unusual tattoos on the dead man's feet to a Crow native named Sunny Sunbird, the investigation draws her deeper into the overlapping worlds of reservation life, backroom meat dealing, and a brazen burglary at the Holmes Meat Processing Plant - a theft that occurred just sixty hours before the murder. The connections keep multiplying. The suspects keep lying. And somewhere between a rural slaughterhouse, a cold storage locker, and a network of people who all seem to know each other a little too well, the truth is waiting.Holmes Slaughterhouse Cases by M.S. Wright is a tightly plotted procedural mystery set against the wide Montana landscape - where justice is complicated by jurisdiction, loyalty, and the hard truths people bury alongside their dead. Fans of Tony Hillerman, Craig Johnson, and Nevada Barr will find in Gwen Jarvi a detective worth following: steady, sharp, and refreshingly human.