Disturbing the Dead - Softcover

Parshall, Sandra

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1458743330 ISBN 13: 9781458743336

Publisher: ReadHowYouWant, 2012

Synopsis

Tom Bridger, who is half Melungeon, thought he had escaped his mountain community's lingering prejudice against the mixed-race group when he left to work for the Richmond, Virginia Police Department. Tom was moving up the detective ranks when a family tragedy brought him back home and moved him into his father's job as a county sheriff's deputy. Now the bones of a Melungeon woman have surfaced on a remote mountaintop, and all evidence points to murder. Violence escalates as the victim's poor family and the wealthy white family she married into scramble to protect their secrets from Tom's probing. Adding to his pain, he wonders if his father was not the man he idolized. Tom is falling in love with veterinarian Rachel Goddard, who is struggling to forge a new life in a place that holds no memories. Rachel puts herself in danger when she befriends the dead woman's niece Holly. As a child, the girl witnessed something that could implicate her aunt's killer, but she is too terrified to tell anyone what she knows. The guilty are determined to silence the girl - and Rachel too, if she interferes - changing Tom's investigation into a personal quest to lay the dead, and the living, to rest.

About this title

About the Author:

Sandra Parshall is a native southerner who worked as a reporter in South Carolina, West Virginia, and Maryland. Her love of the mountains and her interest in small-town law enforcement may be hereditaryone of her grandfathers was a police chief in the Smoky Mountains. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband, a longtime Washington journalist, and their cats.

From Publishers Weekly:

In Parshall's dark, suspenseful second novel (after 2006's Heat of the Moon), Mason County, Va., sheriff's deputy Tom Bridger reopens a cold case that his predecessor—his deceased father, John—never fully closed. Ten years earlier, Pauline McClure, a Melungeon woman (of Portuguese and Native American descent) went missing, and when Tom unearths her bones, he discovers she died of an ax blow to her skull. Pauline had married into a snobbish, wealthy white family, and the reopening of her case pits local Melungeons against the white establishment. Additional tension arises when Tom's romantic interest, veterinarian Rachel Goddard (the heroine of Heat of the Moon), hires and befriends Pauline's teenage niece, Holly Turner, whose connection to the tragedy puts her and Rachel in danger. Both Tom, who's of half Melungeon heritage, and Rachel, who's a recent transplant to Mason County, hoped to leave behind their respective recent violent pasts. Instead, they're drawn into the center of a lethal, gothic drama. (Mar.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: ReadHowYouWant
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1458743330
• ISBN 13: 9781458743336
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 558