Cross Her Heart

Bree Taggert has spent twenty-five years keeping the night her father shot her mother at arm's length. She is a Philadelphia homicide detective now, competent and contained. Then her younger sister Erin is killed in upstate New York, shot in a house full of the same ingredients — a difficult marriage, children in the next room, a gun — and Erin's husband Justin is nowhere to be found.

Bree goes back to the farm country she escaped, takes charge of her sister's two traumatised children, and starts pulling at the case. The evidence points squarely at Justin, and it does not quite add up. She joins forces with Matt Flynn, a former sheriff's investigator and K-9 handler who was Justin's friend and who is convinced the man is innocent, and together they find the parts of Erin's life she kept hidden.

The first Bree Taggert novel introduces Melinda Leigh's rural New York setting, the sheriff's department Bree keeps colliding with, and a detective who is investigating her family's present while never being allowed to forget its past.