Ellie Forman stops at a highway rest stop on her way home from shooting a video at Lake Geneva. She chats with a woman who is is in some distress because her ride hasn't picked her up as expected. In moments, the woman is dead, shot by a sniper while Ellie is standing right beside her.

The shooting is nearly identical to another sniper killing at a different rest stop a few months prior. The woman killed was Daria Flynn, a sous chef at The Lodge in Lake Geneva.

Ellie promises her father, her daughter Rachel, her co-worker Mack, and her friend Susan that she is not getting involved.

That lasts until Irene and Kim Flynn, Daria's mother and sister, come to visit to ask her detailed and persistent questions about Daria's last words, and who Daria was talking to on a borrowed cell phone right before her death. After that, she starts getting way too involved with the investigation, and the local gossip and painful history of the Sutton family, one of the wealthiest families in wealthy Lake Geneva.

For those who read the series in the same slightly random order I have been, this is of course where she meets Luke Sutton and Jimmy Saclarides (Lake Geneva Chief of Police), who will figure in later Ellie Forman and Georgia Davis books.

Ellie is digging into what turns out to be a much older and messier mystery than it first appears, and at the same time she's charting unsettled new waters in her home life. Ex-husband Barry has been seeing the same woman for the last six months, an unprecedented record, and Rachel is developing a relationship with Julia and her two young children. There's lots of insecurity and uncomfortable jealousy in that for Ellie.

It's interesting, it moves, and there's good character development. Recommended.

I received this audiobook as a gift from the author. ( )