The thing about good, gritty noir is that nobody’s going to have clean hands. You’re looking for squeaky-clean heroes who do the right thing? Maybe look elsewhere.

Detective Morgan Jewell is carrying a lot of scars, physical and mental. Going undercover in rural Wisconsin on a missing persons case, Jewell has to get dirty by embedding with the local drug scene to identify the missing man’s associates and figure out if he was killed, fled the state, or is still alive and hiding.

On top of that, Jewell is still hauling around the trauma of seeing her best friend murdered and being unable to help.

Tracey S. Phillips gives us a novel with a hard, well-honed edge, in which the small-town bars, overgrown back roads, and rundown apartments of rural Wisconsin vividly burst into life as the setting for an unflinching mystery that forces you to constantly question whether the suspects are victims, villains, or both.

Nothing is going to be easy in this novel, and the twists are surprising.

This is the sort of crime novel that digs beyond the brutality of crime to uncover the human tragedy beneath.