Detective Dan Reed opted out of the contest, leaving to his father and brothers the task of running the Reed winery. The reader meets him early as he is called to the scene of a discovered grave hidden within a field belonging to the Somers winery. The remains are those of a very young infant whose head had sustained a large amount of blunt force trauma.  Dan is reminded of the kidnapping some twenty-five years earlier of Dylan Somers, who was never found and for whom no ransom note had ever been received. The find is noteworthy enough to be included in the San Francisco newspapers.

There it was read by Patsy Somers, now known as Patsy Owens who is the mother of Dylan Somers. The kidnapping destroyed her marriage and she fled to San Francisco with her young daughter Alexandra, leaving behind her husband and his daughter Rachel from his first marriage. The mother Alexandra knew suffered from a bipolar disorder and this news literally drove her over the edge. When Alex finds her mother she is dead from an apparent overdose of her medication.

Alex was five when her brother was kidnapped and had no recollection of any event before she and her mother had moved from Sonoma. Among the papers on the kitchen table she noticed the story circled and called Dan Reed trying to make some sense of what had happened. She learned that her mother had called him the day before leaving word that she had some information about the case. When he had returned the call he received no answer.

This drew Dan to San Francisco to investigate, finding Alex and acquainting her with her past. Alex had always been driven to discover the identity of her father and her origins, although her mother had refused to discuss it. She seizes this opportunity to learn something about herself so leaves her part time bartending job and her doctoral thesis midstream and heads to Sonoma Valley.

Prior to leaving, Alex finds some boxed possessions of her mother, among them a ring with the unique design of twisted vines engraved with BOV and a date. She hopes to use this to discover her father's identity.

Her arrival in the valley causes a great deal of open hostility which she struggles to understand. She is still troubled by bizarre nightmares of hooded masked people performing a ceremony of some type. Tension escalates when one of the leading growers is found murdered and a tattoo is noticed on the sole of his foot which matches the design of Alex's ring.

Erica Spindler is well known for crafting vivid and multi-layered characters set in creative and complicated plots and she delivers all of that and more in this story. She varies the tension between the possibility of the victim being Dylan Somers and Dan's growing attraction to Alex with extraordinary pacing found within the works of only highly skilled writers.

Blood Vines is a real treat to kick off your summer reading.

--Thea Davis