Bantam
Published September 8, 2026
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
In the second novel featuring Inspector Raquel Laing after Back to the Garden (2022), the San Francisco inspector catches a murder that has a left a gruesome story behind. The victim of a drug killing had been shot in the gut. After dragging himself some distance to go by the blood trail, he was shot again, this time fatally. Whoever killed him was not only cruel, he wanted to send a message: This is what could happen if you cross me. There’s very little to go on, and not much official interest in pursuing the murder of a minor drug dealer, until Raquel encounters a case with a similar M.O. and begins to sense a pattern. It’s a pattern that will take her back into her troubled childhood, and even into the life of her agoraphobic sister Dee, thanks to a DNA test.
Raquel Laing is a socially awkward detective with an unusual skill: Thanks to her lifelong struggle to interpret other people’s nonverbal cues, she has become skilled at reading micro-expressions. This gives her a leg up on knowing when a witness is lying, but her awkwardness, coupled with a drive for answers that sometimes makes her bend the rules, gets her in trouble. In this case, it sends her to the cold case unit as punishment. It’s a cold case that brings her patterns to the fore and reveals information about her birth father. In parallel, Dee’s impulsive decision to use a consumer DNA test to learn more about her family, shakes her world.
Meanwhile, through occasional passages from his point of view, we know there’s a powerful man operating behind the scenes, a man who controls others and has no compunction about destroying anything and anyone who gets in his cold, calculating way.
King respects her readers. This is a complex, slow-moving novel with two time-frames that requires readers to follow several cases with multiple players that are eventually braided together. It also delves into the backstories of Raquel and Dee and their loving but mysterious parents. The plotting is intricate and sophisticated, though the denouement falls back on a rather tired genre trope to reach a resolution.
If you’re looking for an action-packed page turner, this probably won’t fit the bill, but for those who appreciate a cleverly-wrought, labyrinthine plot, the voyage is rewarding.