Hidden Scars: A Sam Blackman Mystery

In De Castrique’s superior sixth mystery featuring Asheville, N.C., PI Sam Blackman (after 2015’s A Specter of Justice), 80-year-old Violet Baker asks Sam to look into the suspicious death of her brother, Paul Weaver, a WWII vet who was a student at nearby Black Mountain College when he took a fatal fall into a ravine in 1946. With the aid of his detective agency partner, Nakayla Robertson, Sam investigates. Meanwhile, a movie that’s being filmed on the Black Mountain campus, based on a sappy romance novel set at the college around the time of Paul’s death, is plagued by sabotage. The stakes rise when a member of the movie crew, octogenarian Harlan Beale, who knew Weaver and has some information to share with Sam about the cold case, is murdered in the local library. Either someone is using the shadow of past misdeeds to cover up present crimes, the past isn’t really dead, or both. De Castrique combines an examination of the South’s troubled racial history with a smart probe of current political-financial shenanigans. Agent: Linda Allen, Linda Allen Literary Agency. (Oct.)