Murder Under the Angel Tree

MURDER UNDER THE ANGEL TREE A Sherie Burton Mystery Beneath the five hundred-year-old live oak on Johns Island, in the green hush the whole Lowcountry holds sacred, they find Barbara Ann Fielding dead. The police call it a mugging gone wrong. Private investigator Sherie Burton knows better the moment she arrives. Barbara Ann was running from something. In the weeks before she died, the quiet bookkeeper had become a keeper of secrets with a fireproof box, a hidden recording, a list of broken people written in a careful hand. The deeper Sherie digs, the higher the trail climbs: past a frightened ex-husband, past a smooth man in a gray building, past a flat, patient voice on a burner phone that knows far too much about Sherie's own mother. All of it points to the cleanest man in Charleston. A name carved over a church vault. A hospital wing, three steeples, a famous garden opened one charity Saturday a year. A man the law has gone soft around for forty years, because suspecting him sounds like the crime. Barbara Ann came at him alone, and it cost her everything. Sherie Burton means to be the first one who doesn't, with a patient chief at her side, a department in the trees, and a truth she cannot leave crooked on the wall. Because the dirt always runs uphill to somebody clean, and this time, somebody's going to be listening when he reaches.

Pagina's: 256, Paperback, Independently published