Frozen Lives

Emily Hartford has a surgical career in Chicago and a boyfriend to match, but she has never quite stopped being the coroner's daughter from Freeport, Michigan. She is pulled back there again when Jeremiah, the eleven-year-old son of her best friend Jo, goes missing on the frozen shore of Lake Michigan.

Days later, Jeremiah is found — alive, unhurt, and telling a story about his abduction that does not hold together. The town exhales; Emily does not. Jo's marriage is coming apart, suspicion is spreading through Freeport in every direction at once, and the boy's safe return turns out to be the beginning of the case rather than the end of it.

Frozen Lives is the fourth Coroner's Daughter mystery, a cold, close-quartered small-town investigation in which the hardest evidence to read is the people.