Blunt Darts — Jeremiah Healy

INNOCENCE DIES

The boy had vanished. The lush Boston suburb didn't offer a clue, but 14-year-old Stephen Kinnington's old-money family did. When John Cuddy investigated he found skeletons in every closet: a mother's suicide that might not have been suicide, a father's cover-up, an uncle decorated for Vietnam war heroics he never performed, a bodyguard with an ugly past.

Just out of a job as an insurance investigator, still getting over his wife's death, John Cuddy is striking out on his own when he starts looking into Stephen's disappearance. Forcing his way through a wall of well-bought silence, Cuddy follows a twisting trail to places he doesn't want to be, with a woman he doesn't want to hurt, into a drowning pool of madness, deceit, and murder.