This book tells what I assume is the first story of sheriff Bet Rivers. She takes over as interim Sheriff after her dad’s death. She always expected to come back to her small town after a glorious career at the LA PD, but her dad’s decease made her change plans. She is immediately faced with some challenges and a weird case.

The book has many characters but I never find it confusing. Sometimes it seems like a story gets told about half way, only for the writer to come back to it later on. I knew pretty early on who the perp was, but the writing style and story twists had me second guessing myself multiple times. I really liked this book.

This was a pretty good story, focused on Elizabeth ("Bet"), who takes over as interim sheriff in a small town in Eastern WA after her father and predecessor, Earle, passes away. She is undecided on whether she really wants to stay there and run for the office of Sheriff or go back to LA to chase her dreams there, when a murder occurs that gets her deep into secrets held by the residents of the town.

I thought this was an exciting story and it gave me good imagery of the lake and the mine, which were really fascinating. There were also a couple times where I thought something was missed or misspoken, but the author went back to it and tied up all of those loose ends as part of the story.

The only thing I didn't really like is that there were SO MANY characters, some with similar names, that it just got confusing. I found myself having to either page back to remember how characters were related to each other, or break from the story and remind myself how everyone fit together before continuing. I think this would have been an equally effective story with less characters, and/or more thought put into similarity between names.

All in all, I enjoyed this book and assume its part of a series- I expect that I will read the next one (and I'll already know all the characters by then). Thanks to Netgalley for providing me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

After the death of her father, Bet Rivers assumes his role as interim sheriff. While she had made up her mind to move to L.A. , she’s compelled to stay in Collier after her strange recurring nightmare comes true. A woman’s body is found in the local lake, no one has been reported missing and she can’t be identified, but she must have mattered to someone. As Bet launches an investigation into the woman’s murder, she realizes that her small town is hiding some big, ugly secrets. Taylor shows us that big cities don’t have the corner on murder and mayhem