* THE BLISTERING FINAL INSTALMENT OF THE AWARD-WINNING HIGHWAY 59 SERIES *

** WINNER OF THE CRIME FICTION LOVER BOOK OF THE YEAR EDITOR'S CHOICE **
** SHORTLISTED FOR THE CWA GOLD DAGGER AWARD **
** A FINANCIAL TIMES CRIME AND THRILLER BOOK OF THE YEAR **
** AN OBSERVER CRIME AND THRILLER BOOK OF THE YEAR **

'One of America's finest crime novelists' - DAILY MAIL
'Lyrical, complex and deeply engaged... this is top-quality crime fiction' - OBSERVER
'A searing story about race and class. Locke's writing is exceptionally vivid' - SUNDAY TIMES

Texas Ranger Darren Mathews has handed in his badge. A choice made three years before, which served justice if not the law, means that he may now stand trial. And his mother - an intermittent and destructive force in his life - is the cause of his fall from grace.

And yet it is his mother's reappearance that may also be his salvation. A black girl at an all-white sorority at a nearby college is missing, her belongings tossed in a dumpster. Her sorority sisters, the college police, even the girl's own family, deny that she has disappeared, but Sera Fuller is nowhere to be found. A bloodstained shirt discovered in a woodland clearing may be the last trace of her. And Darren's mother wants her son to work the case.

Disillusioned by an America forever changed by the presidency of Donald Trump, Darren reluctantly agrees. Yet as he sets out to find a girl whose family don't want her found, it is his own family's history that may be brought painfully into the light. And a reckoning with his past may finally show Darren the future he can build.