First Published: 2017
The book starts with a young man on his boat, intending to check a crab trap.
He does this under the cover of darkness because it is forbidden to crab this early in the year. When he is checking the crab pot, he is startled when he discovers a hand. The police are called, and Tracy comes to the scene, and she questions the young man, Kurt Schill, but he says he didn’t see anybody. What he thinks is that the body was a woman’s because of her nails. He is true, and the woman’s body is recovered.
The pathologist tells Tracy and Kins that the woman had reconstructive plastic surgery, and as implants need to be recorded, it is easy to find the plastic surgeon. Dr Yee Wu tells them that the woman’s name is Lorna Hoff, but he has little information about her. She didn’t tell him anything about her family, and she demanded to have all her photographs back and paid in cash. Dr Wu hints that this woman seemed to be on the run. The motel where she stayed offers as little information as Dr Wu, and in the room Tracy finds no mobile phone, credit cards or anything that can offer some clue.
The chapters of the investigation are interspersed with chapters taken place in 2016, a year before. The narrator tells us that she is getting married to Graham Strickland, a man she met at a party and has been dating for only four months. The narrator, who remains unnamed for a few chapters, is an orphan; her parents died in a car crash which she was also involved, and she went to live with an uncle temporarily but she was removed from there when she told that her uncle came to her bed at night. The narrator describes her wedding as a small affair, and even though she is nervous, I can’t feel that she is really in love.
In another chapter Graham comes home with exciting news. Graham, who is a lawyer, tells his wife that she has an idea to make money. As marijuana is to be made legal, Graham wants to set up a dispensary, but she is not so sure because he wants to leave his job and the opportunity to be made a partner. Graham gets angry, saying that she doesn’t support him at all.
In present time Tracy’s team finds a photograph of the dead woman through her driving licence, which is the only thing that they have so far. Tracy thinks that Lorna may not be her real name, and this woman seems to be a ghost. Later at home Tracy gets a call from Glen Hicks, who is a ranger in Mount Rainier National Park, and he tells her that after seeing the photograph he can tell her about the woman. Glen says that the woman’s name is Andrea Strickland, and she and her husband, Graham, had permission to climb Liberty Ridge. Glenn explains that the second night the woman left the tent to pee, and she never returned. Her husband slept the whole night through, and then he raised the alarm. A search party went to find her, and they found some of her objects in a ravine, so it was thought that she had fallen there. Glen actually thought that her husband had pushed her.
In the alternative chapters Andrea and Graham go to the bank because he has eventually persuaded her to join his project. Andrea is unsure when they are in the bank, and then she says that she was left a trust by her parents. Graham gets upset because this is the first time he has heard about the trust. Andrea says that she didn’t say anything because it isn’t important. Besides, she can only use the money for things she needs, but she can’t use it to invest in businesses or something alike.
This is intriguing, and I wonder how Andrea ended up in a crab trap in a lake when she got lost in the mountains. I can see that her marriage wasn’t happy, and maybe she needed to escape from Graham and he finally discovered her and killed her???
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