River of Lies is the second in author James L’Etoile’s Detective Emily Hunter Mystery series. Though it continues with the same characters both major and minor, it can easily be read as a standalone. I’ve read and enjoyed L’Etoile’s earlier Nathan Parker and Detective Penley series. Readers who enjoy noir, thrillers, police procedurals, and suspense will enjoy his books. L’Etoile uses his twenty-nine years as an associate warden in a maximum-security prison, a hostage negotiator, facility captain, and director of California’s state parole system to add verisimilitude to his novels. His style is taut and fast-paced, and he wields red herrings like a knife-thrower. He also deftly blends current events into his fiction. Those who follow L’Etoile on social media will recognize his “not my cat” who has adopted him in the cat who adopts Hunter.
When the homeless camps spread throughout the city of Sacramento become targets of arson, Detective Emily Hunter and her partner, Javier Medina, take over the investigation from other detectives. Despite the fact that at the arson sites, bodies of a former mayor and a social worker are found at the arson site, the city, at unprecedented speed, cleans up the arson sites the next day, destroying evidence.
Caught in the blaze, a mother, Lisa Larkin, is badly burned, but her daughter, Willow, escapes. The roles of the various characters shift (the mayor, Larkin and her daughter, the social worker, the former mayor) as the plot thickens.
Hunter deals with all this while searching for a memory care unit for her mother who’s suffering from Alzheimer’s and a budding relationship with a fellow cop.
********************
River of Lies (Oceanview Publishing, January 7, 2025) is available through:
Your local independent bookseller | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
********************
You can read my reviews of other James L’Etoile novels here:
********************
This post contains affiliate links to third party sites. These can help you visually identify books I recommend. If you make a purchase, I may receive a small compensation at no additional cost to you. This offsets some of the cost of maintaining this blog.
