Casey is a woman with a past and has made an uneasy truce with herself about her former life. She has started over in Raleigh, North Carolina, as a sort of private investigator for big Bobby D. Unlicensed and not allowed to carry a weapon since she has a prison record, Casey usually confines her talents to finding missing persons and surveillance, although even those activities have gotten her in trouble before.*

One day, the ex-husband responsible for her prison stay shows up, attempts to charm Casey, but only succeeds in annoying her. She ignores his sob story about a cocaine deal gone bad and mobsters after him, and turns to her latest case, a missing husband.

Pretty Tawny Bledsoe enlists Casey’s help in locating her soon-to-be-ex husband who disappeared with their four-year-old daughter. Tawny is bruised from a beating, and although Casey can’t warm up to the tiny blonde, she dislikes wife abusers even more, and agrees to track down the husband. Casey quickly discovers this case is a potential hot potato, since the missing husband is Robert Price, a local Commissioner and well-respected businessman. She has no trouble locating him and the little girl, notifies her client, then hides to watch the reunion in case there’s trouble. There’s trouble all right, but not what she expected; the daughter is terrified of her mother, and Tawny has brought along a large boyfriend who beats Price badly.

Even if Price is a wife beater, Casey still feels uncomfortable about the situation and is glad to be out of it. When the boyfriend turns up dead two days later, it’s Price who is arrested, in part because of what Casey witnessed and told police. Then Tawny’s check bounces higher than a kite while both she and the daughter seem to have disappeared. Casey is infuriated at being used and goes looking for Tawny with a vengeance, delving into her past.

Turns out Tawny started out as Tammy, leaving poverty as well as her family behind as she climbed her way up in the world aided by multiple prior husbands. Casey starts questioning just what the difference is between Tawny and herself, since she, too, left her family in the past and reinvented herself, sometimes cheating a little along the edges.

Be forewarned, there are some rather graphic descriptions and distasteful phrases scattered throughout the book. Along the way, Casey is no lady and neither is her language.

While justice is amply served in the end, it would have been nice if Tawny’s first victims, her family, had gained something, but I guess real life doesn’t always have happy endings.

*Legwork

--K. W. Becker