Murder at Mountain Tavern

Aubrey McKenna, a celebrated criminal investigator, has lost most everything she ever cared about. After a heart-wrenching breakup with the man she thought was her soul mate, her job of a lifetime crumbled in a publicly humiliating dismissal from her position as chief investigator for the attorney general of Pennsylvania. She now finds herself between jobs, struggling to maintain newly found sobriety and determined to recover personally and professionally. At the request of her best friend, the assistant district attorney for Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, she accepts a job investigating a previously solved murder. New evidence, which will likely exonerate the man already serving a life sentence, has been discovered, and it appears that the real killer in the horrific slashing of a teenage girl is still at large. Will McKenna be able to solve this thirty-year-old cold case?

In Mountain City, Pennsylvania—a sleepy small town in the heart of the state’s eastern anthracite coal mining region—appearances are deceiving, and the investigation enmeshes McKenna in both a web of intrigue with the town’s power broker and an unexpected opportunity for romance. In her quest for delayed justice, which also becomes a search for self and recovery, McKenna uses persistence, grit, and human compassion to negotiate the twists, turns, and surreal coincidences of an investigation that ultimately reaches far beyond the confines of Mountain City. Her search for the killer unearths a trail of serial rape and murder—and political corruption reaching into the depths of the state’s capital.

-- Greg Dillensnyder