A Merciful Death

Mercy Kilpatrick left Eagle's Nest, Oregon at eighteen, cast out by her survivalist family and by a secret she has carried ever since. Fifteen years on she is an FBI special agent in Portland — and a woman who still keeps a stocked cabin in the woods, prepared for a collapse she believes is coming.

When aging preppers start turning up murdered in her hometown, Mercy is sent back to work the case with the local police chief, Truman Daly. The investigation drags her into the community that shunned her, the family that stopped speaking to her, and the buried event that made her leave.

A Merciful Death opens Kendra Elliot's Mercy Kilpatrick series: a procedural thriller wrapped around a small-town homecoming that no one, least of all Mercy, wanted.