I’ve read most of Joe Clifford’s works and found A Moth to Flame to be his best so far. He tells the story of two sisters: Jess, the elder, who had been found dead at the bottom of a ravine twenty-five years earlier, and Lydia, the younger, now an investigator for the coroner’s department.
Lydia and her family are somewhat estranged; her mother always preferred Jess and feels her death was Lydia’s fault. Helping her deal with this familial angst is her professional mentor, Maureen Gearon, who’s also grooming Lydia for a promotion.
As Lydia investigates a new murder, she realizes the woman’s cause of death was a broken neck with a fractured hyoid bone—just like her sister’s. She finds further clues when she discovers a true-crime YouTube channel hosted by Shane Elliot, a former high school classmate. On air he reveals that Jess’s death wasn’t an accident. The local police department, with Jess’s former boyfriend and current police chief, seems trapped in a web of lies. His father, the former police chief, did an inadequate job of investigation possibly because his son was a suspect in the murder.
This is an action-packed read with an unusual ticking bomb: a wild fire ravaging the area around Lydia’s family home. An excellent read.
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A Moth to Flame (Square Tire Books, February 1, 2024) is available through:
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