Where Echoes Live — Marcia Muller

IN HER TWELFTH OUTING, P.I. Sharon McCone leaves her San Francisco turf for the forbidding high desert landscape of Tufa Lake near the Nevada border. An environmental group thinks that the Hong Kong-based Transpacific Corporation has some dubious plans for an abandoned gold mine near the ghost town of Promiseville.

Sharon's investigation takes a grim turn when the bullet-riddled body of a Transpacific employee turns up in Tula Lake. Then a local prospector suddenly disappears and Lionel Ong, the president of Transpacific, is kidnapped. Has one of the environmental activists, perhaps the mysterious Hy Ripinsky, taken matters into his own hands?

As she pieces together the interlocking puzzle of personal histories and private interests that led to murder, Sharon finds that her heart won't follow where her logic leads. It takes a final explosive confrontation and a hard look at her own darkest impulses to solve the most disturbing case of her career.