Empathy's Edge - A Benton Stone Mystery, #1

Benton Stone can feel what a room is hiding.

It's the reason he was good at the job once and part of the reason he lost it. Now he works quietly out of a rain-worn Minneapolis neighborhood, taking the cases the police have already closed, the ones where the official answer arrived too fast and left the wrong shape behind.

Rachel Montgomery was a lifelong swimmer, found dead in her own backyard pool. Ruled an accident before lunch. Her husband has an alibi a mile long and a grief that feels, to Stone, absolutely real. That's the problem. Because a feeling isn't a fact, the guilt coming off Brandon Montgomery is the guilt of a man who looked away, not a man who planned anything. Stone knows the difference. He's just not sure, this time, that he can trust himself to feel it.

With his oldest friend on the force risking a career already scarred by the same captain who once ended Stone's, the two of them follow a trail of small, deliberate things: a camera angled away from the deep end, a fitness tracker that stopped at 12:41, a heater set to run warm on the coldest kind of night. Every piece was arranged by someone patient. Someone careful. Someone who closed every account properly before she disappeared.

The killer Stone is looking for doesn't leak fear or guilt or anything he can catch. She is the one person in the whole case he cannot read, and by the time he understands what that silence means, he's already spent weeks pointed at the wrong door.

A literary mystery about grief, loyalty, and the cost of trusting what you feel, EMPATHY'S EDGE introduces Benton Stone: a detective whose greatest gift is also the thing most likely to lead him astray.

First in the Benton Stone P.I. series.