Disturbing the Dead

Praise for Disturbing the Dead... "Edge-of-the-seat suspense and a budding romance for Tom and Rachel make this essential reading for fans of Margaret Maron and Karin Slaughter." -Library Journal starred review Tom Bridger, who is half Melungeon, thought he had escaped his mountain community's lingering prejudice against the mixed-race group when he left to work for the Richmond, Virginia Police Department. Then a family tragedy brought him back home and moved him into his father's job as a county sheriff's deputy. Now the bones of a Melungeon woman have surfaced on a remote mountaintop, and all evidence points to murder. Violence escalates as the victim's poor family and the wealthy white family she married into scramble to protect their secrets from Tom's probing. In the meantime, Tom's new love, veterinarian Rachel Goddard, struggling to escape her own past, puts herself in danger when she befriends the dead woman's niece. The girl witnessed something that could implicate the killer, but she is too terrified to tell anyone what she knows. The guilty are determined to silence her-and Rachel too, if she interferes-changing Tom's investigation into a personal quest to lay the dead...and the living...to rest. Sandra Parshall is a native southerner who worked as a reporter in South Carolina, West Virginia, and Maryland. She lives in Northern Virginia. www.sandraparshall.com