Murder at Haven's Rock

September 1, 2022

Designed to keep the world out and its residents' secrets in, off-the-grid Rockton is now rotten with corruption. So Det. Casey Duncan and her boyfriend, Sheriff Eric Dalton, are building a new town even deeper in the Yukon. Already there's trouble: despite warnings, two crew members have ambled into the woods and are now missing. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

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Starred review from December 19, 2022
Armstrong’s excellent first entry in a Rockton spinoff series (after 2022’s Deepest of Secrets) finds Casey Butler and her husband, Sheriff Eric Dalton, who met in Rockton, a Yukon town intended to serve as a refuge for those, such as domestic abuse victims, for whom the legal system’s protections were insufficient, resolved to use her substantial inheritance to self-fund construction of a similar community, Haven’s Rock, after the ideals of Rockton were compromised. The new venture begins badly. Yolanda, the contractor in charge of the project, calls on Casey and Eric for their tracking skills when two members of her team—Penny, the architect, and Bruno, the engineer—disappear after violating the worksite’s prime rule not to wander into the thick neighboring forest. Casey and Eric encounter an unknown person who first flees, and then steals Casey’s backpack after she falls into a camouflaged pit. There, she makes a grim discovery—the stabbed corpse of a woman, who Yolanda says is not her missing employee. Armstrong gives her lead a complex mystery to solve, while vividly evoking the eerie isolation of the setting. Paul Doiron fans will be pleased. Agent: Lucienne Diver, Knight Agency.

January 1, 2023
The idealistic attempt to carve a new town out of the Yukon snow runs into criminal complications that threaten to reduce the tiny population to zero. Det. Casey Butler has every reason to be deeply invested in Haven's Rock. She and her husband, Rockton Sheriff Eric Dalton, have financed the new settlement, breaking away from the marginally more established refuge of Rockton, with money Casey inherited. Her eventful history with Rockton makes her eager for the new town, whose every resident will be hand-picked by Dalton and her, to succeed. So she's alarmed to learn that three of those residents ignored the place's paramount rule--don't go into the forest--and only one of them returned. Yolanda the contractor, last spotted walking into the woods with Bruno the engineer, is back safe and sound, but finding Bruno will become the top priority of Casey and Dalton and their canine and human cohort. Soon after he's rescued, Bruno goes AWOL from his hospital bed without more than hinting at what happened in the forest, and this time he turns up dead. Even worse, Penny, the architect who followed Yolanda and Bruno when she first saw them walking away from the town in progress, remains missing, presumed dead--until Casey and Dalton find a dead woman who turns out to be Denise, the second wife of Mark, a prospective resident who's on a secret mission of his own. Few readers will be able to name any of the suspects an hour after putting this spinoff down, but they'll still be shivering with cold. Armstrong's new twist on her Rockton franchise scores higher as wilderness adventure than as mystery.

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