Rollover — Susan Slater

A bank heist turns sleepy little Wagon Mound, New Mexico, on its ear. It's no straight-forward, “demand all the money at gun-point and hustle out the front door” kind of robbery. It's a sneaky tunneling that probably took months to complete and landed the thieves in a room of safe deposit boxes―not the vault with two million bucks for a ranch sale next door. Was this some mistake, or was the thieves' target the Tiffany-designed sapphire and diamond necklace belonging to eighty-five year old Gertrude Kennedy, a family heirloom from the days of the Titanic? The necklace is insured with United Life and Casualty for half a million. The company sends their ace investigator, Dan Mahoney, a Chicagoan still in New Mexico recuperating from events in Flash Food, and romancing the intrepid Elaine Linden, to the scene of the crime. Delayed when his Jeep overheats, Dan catches a ride and is the hapless passenger in a rollover that kills the driver and lands Dan in Santa Fe's hospital. Dan soon learns the rollover was no accident. Someone wants him kept out of Wagon Mound at any cost. Dan hasn't lived his life looking over his shoulder and he's not starting now. But when Elaine disappears and people close to the case, like the bank's manager, turn up dead, he suspects there's more going on than a robbery. The note slipped under his rented room's door in the dead of night says it all―“it's not what you think”. Fast-paced from first to last, Rollover combines the murder mystery with the caper for a captivating read.