Black Like Blood — Russ Hall

Retired schoolteacher Esbeth Walters takes a job as dispatcher in a rural Texas community and finds her sharp wits quickly tested in a double murder investigation. Someone has killed the town's mayor--then one week later, a skeleton is pulled from the bottom of a lake. Missing for forty years, it's the mayor's older brother, a decorated war veteran.

Esbeth is further drawn into the dark undertow of a small town gripped by betrayal, violence, greed, corruption--and a lost fortune in diamonds. She's put her stock in trustworthy Texas Ranger Tillis Macrory, perhaps the only local lawman around worthy of the badge. But that doesn't stop her from trying to uncover the shocking truth about what's been happening in Hoel's Dam--or finding herself in dangerously deep waters as terrible secrets emerge.