Deeper Than the Dead

Deeper Than the Dead opens Debra Webb's Vera Boyett series with a homecoming built on disaster. Vera's career as deputy chief of the Memphis Police Department has just gone down in flames when she gets the call: Sheree, the stepmother who vanished from her family's Fayetteville, Tennessee farm decades earlier, has finally been found — dead.

Returning home means facing her father, now in a memory care facility, and reconnecting with her younger sister Eve and half-sister Luna, all while a small-town summer unspools secrets that go well beyond Sheree's disappearance. Vera's police instincts pull her into an investigation the local force isn't equipped, or perhaps willing, to run properly.

The novel works as both police procedural and family drama, using Vera's professional skepticism to peel back a town's layered history of buried grievances and hidden bodies.