Blue Ridge, Black Heart

Disgraced, disbarred and defriended, ex-lawyer Morgan Pike is nearly bankrupt and desperate for a paycheck. She accepts the only job she’s been offered in a year of looking—private investigator with a Chattanooga, Tennessee firm. Morgan has been with the company for a year. Her goal is to stay out of trouble and serve the remaining two years of her four-year suspension and return to her prior life as a defense attorney in Richmond, Virginia.
Bored by divorce and insurance cases and against the advice of her boss, she becomes involved in the search for a beautiful young woman who has disappeared without a trace. The case takes her from the Blue Ridge Mountains of north Georgia to the dark underbelly of post-Katrina New Orleans and back. Her unrelenting quest for the truth propels her into terrifying clashes with members of a violent survivalist cabal in the southern Appalachian Mountains. The investigation builds to a stunning and dramatic conclusion that no one saw coming.
Here is a short excerpt from the book:
“Sunday morning I took my first cup of coffee and sat at the café table by the sliding doors leading to the balcony of my apartment. I pulled my robe close and leaned back from the table. Something flashed in the glass door. The left side of my face erupted with the pain of a thousand wasp stings. The door spider-webbed with cracks radiating from a small hole. I recognized the sound of a bullet snapping past my head.
I sat stunned, shocked, uncomprehending. A second passed, then my body reacted. I dived for the floor just as the glass in the door disintegrated. A second bullet cracked through the room, tearing into the floor a foot from my face. A third shot blasted through the kitchen wall and smashed into the dishwasher.
I scrambled on hands and knees toward the bedroom. Three more bullets ripped through the walls of the apartment. Using the bed as a shield between me and the outside wall, I reached up to the nightstand, grabbed my phone and dialed.
“911. What is your emergency?”
“Someone’s shooting at me—again.”