I came across ‘My Sister’s Grave‘ as I was excavating the depths of my TBR pile. I bought it back in 2015, about a year after its release as an audiobook, when it was being promoted as a debut novel from a promising new author kicking off a new series. Then I lost sight of it. I found it again because I saw good reviews of ‘One Last Kill‘ (2023), the tenth and latest book in the series.

As soon as I started to read ‘My Sister’s Grave‘, I was slapping my forehead and asking “How have I let this sit on my shelves untouched since 2015?” I was immediately swept up by the storytelling. There was nothing startlingly original about content or form. It’s a familiar formula for an American police procedural BUT it was really well done. The intercut timelines worked well, capturing my curiosity and engaging my emotions. I was hooked and having fun.

It helped that Tracy Crosswhite was easy to like. She’s not a prima donna. She doesn’t have a substance abuse problem. She isn’t prone to suicidal ideations as a result of past sins. So she avoids the obvious hard-bitten detective clichés. Instead, she’s someone who has the respect of her peers and who enjoys her work as a Seattle PD homicide detective. When she returned to her small home town in Washington State, where the local sheriff knew her parents and watched her and her sister grow up, I got to see a little more of her passion and her frustration but I also saw how well she kept control of herself and focused on getting the results that she needed.

I was drawn in by Tracy’s relationship with her younger sister, Sarah and felt strongly enough about Sarah herself that I was angered by my foreknowledge that no matter how brave or resourceful she was, she wouldn’t survive.

I thought the book was stronger because it wasn’t a one-woman show and it wasn’t all about detection. Tracey enlists the help of her school friend, Dan O’Leary, now a lawyer and he handles the courtroom part of the action. I thought the court scenes were well done. Still a little more dramatic than real life but without any ‘Perry Mason’ histrionics.

The mystery has enough twists that I didn’t guess at the outcome. This was partly because of how well-drawn the characters of local Sheriff Roy Calloway and convicted killer Edmund House were written. Both of them came across as untrustworthy and dangerous and neither of them had clean hands. House was chilling throughout. Calloway was… gratifyingly complex.

This was a page-turner of a book, cleverly structured to maintain the tension, engage the emotions, feed the curiosity and deliver excitement by cutting between present and past and between discovery and action.

The upside of having let a very entertaining book sit on my shelves for nine years is that nine more books in the series have already been published. I looking forward to reading my way through them.

I listened to the audiobook version of ‘My Sister’s Grave’, narrated by Emily Sutton-Smith and I’ll be sticking with that format for the next book, ‘Third Watch’. Click on the SoundCloud link below for a sample of Emily Sutton-Smith’s narration.