The Coroner

Emily Hartford left Freeport, Michigan a decade ago, after her mother's death, and has not looked back: she is a surgical resident in Chicago, newly engaged, with a life that has nothing to do with the town she grew up in. Then a call comes that her estranged father, Freeport's medical examiner, has suffered a massive heart attack.

Back home, Emily is pressed into service in his place, and her first case is not routine. Julie Dobson, a state senator's daughter, has been found dead beside her horse, apparently thrown and killed by a head wound. The autopsy tells Emily a different story, and once she says so out loud, the town's comfortable version of events begins to come apart.

Working alongside Nick Larson — her high-school boyfriend, now the sheriff — Emily is pulled deeper into the case, closer to a father she never forgave, and eventually into the killer's path. The Coroner is the first of Jennifer Graeser Dornbush's Coroner's Daughter mysteries, written by a real coroner's daughter with a forensic specialist's eye for the details.