Blog

Trailbreaker by Ruthie Knox and Annie Mare

Book & Author Information + a Giveaway!

 

Don’t miss any blog tour posts! Click the link here.

---

Trailbreaker

Suspicions that a serial killer is terrorizing a pristine tourist spot draw a single mom and budding private investigator into a twisting and deepening mystery of secrets and murder. Single mom and newly minted private investigator Prairie Nightingale has opened the doors of her Green Bay, Wisconsin, agency and is ready for work. She and her crew aren’t quite prepared for their first client, though: Bernie Dubicki, a notorious online journalist and not-altogether-reliable provocateur, who claims the idyllic vacation destination of nearby Door County is home to a serial killer.

She’s pinpointed four seemingly unrelated deaths that haven’t raised suspicions for anyone else. But when a college student vanishes, Bernie’s sizable retainer convinces Prairie to help connect the dots. And trusted, flirty FBI agent Foster Rosemare thinks Bernie might be onto something. Prairie never expected her first investigation to be so big—like Dateline big—but she does have an inquiring mind and a knack for seeing things no one else can.

In this case she’ll have to look deep—not only into the secrets of strangers, but into Door County’s woods—to solve a mystery decades in the making.

Trailbreaker (Prairie Nightingale)
Mystery
2nd in Series
Setting – Wisconsin
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Thomas & Mercer
Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 27, 2026
Print length ‏ : ‎ 299 pages
Paperback
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1662535996
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1662535994
Digital
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1662529801
ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0F5RKCRFK

To purchase your copy of Trailbreaker, click any of the following links: Amazon – Bookshop.org – Barnes & Noble –

---

Trailbreaker Excerpt

Trailbreaker

Chapter One

Prairie Nightingale meditated on the gold-leaf letters decorating the privacy glass in front of her: Prairie Hawk Investigations.

It was quiet on the seventh floor of the antique Baylor Building. So quiet, she could hear muffled voices coming from the only other office on the floor. That office belonged to a therapist Prairie and her ex-husband had seen together before they got divorced.

She wondered what the couple was talking about. When she and Greg saw the therapist, Greg had mostly complained about not being adequately appreciated, while Prairie had fumbled for the words to describe what it felt like to lose herself under the invisible burden of making Greg and her children’s lives amazing, such that she’d once filled out a school permission slip and forgotten her own last name.

It was Nightingale. Prairie Hawk Nightingale.

Now, several years later, here was her name emblazoned in gold on a door leading to a spacious office in a historic downtown Green Bay building. Prairie would have expected this to mean that she finally knew exactly who she was: A mother of two daughters. A homemaker. A woman interesting to a handsome agent of the FBI, not for crimes, but for her mind, and a little bit for how good her backside looked in jeans.

She was also, as the gold letters declared, a private investigator.

It wasn’t an outcome she’d planned on when she inserted herself in the murder investigation of Lisa Radcliffe last fall. Lisa had been a mom friend of Prairie’s. Discovering exactly how she died at the hands of her husband, Chris, had carved a piece out of Prairie’s heart that she could never replace.

Her innate curiosity, along with a talent for vital pattern recognition, were what had inspired Prairie to invite three incredible women to take a leap into the unknown with her: the capable executive assistant who’d been helping Prairie run her household since her divorce; her ex-mother-in-law, who’d become a forensic genealogist in retirement; and a nineteen-year-old up-and-coming true crime podcaster who’d impressed Prairie with her clear-eyed commitment to equity.

So far, the four of them had leaped only to stumble. No one was knocking on their door. This morning would be the first time they’d gathered at the office in months. Frequently, Prairie found herself sitting straight up in bed in the middle of the night, her heart racing, thinking about the zero dollars she and these women were making and the regret they must feel for believing in her.

She reached out and touched the gold letters.

The glass flew backward from her fingertips.

“What the hell are you doing out here?” Marian Banks stood in front of her, holding open the door Prairie had just been sadly fondling. “You know I could see your shadow staring in at me through the glass? It was more than a little creepy.”

No doubt it had been creepy. And, Prairie could admit, maudlin. She resettled her trusty crossbody messenger bag on her shoulder, determined to adjust her attitude. “Am I late?”

Marian had called the partners together on a Thursday morning with little more than an hour’s notice, requiring Prairie to inform her ex that he would have to drop off their daughters for their morning activities. Greg had told her, in turn, that this errand was not “on his list,” forcing Prairie to counter that both appointments were “on the shared calendar,” and it was Greg’s day to be in charge of their girls.

“No, you’re early,” Marian said. “I lied about what time I needed you. Good thing, too. I can already tell you’re in a state, and I haven’t told you about the mouse poop on the conference table yet.”

“You’re joking. How?” Had it been that long since Prairie stopped by the office? She crossed the room to inspect the surface of the table. “Motherlover, that is mouse poop. I was hoping it was a few black sesame seeds or something. This is tragic.” Their office had become as dilapidated as Prairie’s dream of a justice-focused private investigations agency—neglected so long, it had fallen into a rodent-infested state of near-abandonment.

“For heaven’s sake.” Marian walked over to the bank of beautiful stone-framed windows on the street-facing wall and pulled up the blinds. A tasteful glimpse of softly rounded belly peeked out from beneath her silky crop top. Marian had turned up for this morning’s meeting with fully contoured makeup and false eyelashes. Prairie couldn’t help but appreciate how the natural light coming through the window caught the shine of Marian’s glossy, artificially messy brunette updo—though her business partner’s glamour made the office look considerably worse.

“I thought we were paying for housekeeping.” She gingerly sat down on one of the rolling leather office chairs.

“We were,” Marian confirmed. “Until it was no longer safe for our finances to pay them.”

They’d leased the office just over a year ago, riding the high of Prairie’s key role in Chris Radcliffe’s arrest, and then they’d studied and PI-licensed and financial-planned themselves into a state of arrogant certainty. But it turned out that the good people of northeastern Wisconsin were wary of a detective agency composed of women who had no interest in surveilling affair partners or stalking injured factory workers whose supervisors suspected them of workers’ comp fraud.

Green Bay wasn’t keen on outsiders who didn’t seem to be following the rules. And even though Prairie’s business partners had all lived in Green Bay their entire lives, Prairie wasn’t from here, and didn’t follow the rules, and that was enough.

“We’d be making a profit if we took the cheater jobs,” Marian said. “But never mind. I’ve got something up my sleeve this morning that—”

A blaring ringtone drowned out whatever she had been about to say. When Prairie fished her phone out of her bag, she saw Greg’s name on its screen. “Sorry,” she said. “I have to take this.”

Marian’s sour frown at the intrusion came and went so quickly, Prairie would have thought she’d imagined it if she didn’t know Marian so well.

With a sigh, she accepted her phone call.

“Hey, so, there’s a bit of a situation with Maelynn’s thing,” Greg said before a blast of white noise forced Prairie to put the call on speaker.

Wind, she guessed. The university was close to the bay. Their younger daughter was on her way to attend math day camp with adolescents three to five years older than her so she could learn math Prairie didn’t remember ever learning and had certainly never used.

“Why are you still at drop-off?” Prairie asked.

“They’re saying she was supposed to do a prescreen for the session that starts next week. They want it right now.”

“I told you about the prescreen.”

“Well, I don’t have it in my email.”

Greg’s mother, Joyce Ozmanski, clomped through the open office door. Joyce lived in a mother-in-law apartment separated by a breezeway from Prairie’s house, and she was in and out of Prairie’s living space all the time. She’d recently purchased a pair of artsy clogs with wooden soles. Prairie heard the sound of Joyce’s clogs in her sleep.

“Good morning, ladies!” Joyce smoothed a curl of her red-and-golden-streaked hair behind her ear. She looked stylish today in wide-legged gaucho pants and a long teal jacket. “Oh, you’re on the phone, Prairie.”

“I didn’t email it,” Prairie told her ex, throwing Joyce a distracted wave. “I put it in the thread on Slack.”

“Heavens, is this rodent droppings on the table?” Joyce asked at a volume the therapist down the hall could probably hear.

“The Wi-Fi isn’t good where I am,” Greg complained. “I can’t get Slack to load. Can you text me the link?”

“Mom?” Maelynn’s voice broke in, ripe with rising panic. “Would you come pick me up?”

Thirteen years old, gifted, autistic, deeply empathetic, and socially anxious, Maelynn sometimes melted down when things didn’t go to plan.

Math camp had started fifteen minutes ago.

Greg made a choking noise. “Hon, no, we’ve got this. Prairie, I hate to interrupt your meeting or whatever, but if you could just do the form for me quick and then let me know when it’s ready?”

“Wait, what’s going on?” Joyce asked. “Do you need me to go pick up Maelynn?”

“No,” Prairie mouthed back silently. “We’ve got this.”

Marian rolled her eyes.

“God, the smell. What died in here?” Emma Cornelius, the fourth partner in Prairie Hawk Investigations, tossed her head as she slammed the office door shut behind her, making her black braid swing against her leather motorcycle jacket.

Prairie forced herself to relax her shoulders as a way to resist the tension that wanted to lock up her body.

When she’d told Greg her plan to launch a PI agency, he had been so supportive, so eager to form a closer bond with their children by learning to do what Prairie did as chief homemaker for their children’s household at 724 Maple Street. Prairie had not anticipated, in the dream-drunk flush of getting the agency off the ground, how long Greg’s training period would last. Or how much time he would take off. Or how easy it would be, day after day, to choose to do what she already knew how to do—what made her feel competent—instead of learning something new.

This was her fault.

Joyce clapped her hands together. “It’s not as though we don’t know how to clean, right, girls? Emma, why don’t you go get some paper towels and bleach spray from the hall closet, and we’ll whip this place into shape.”

Joyce was one of Prairie’s favorite people, and she’d been more than useful to the business. In fact, the clients they’d taken on so far were exclusively people who wanted to put Joyce’s genealogy skills to use finding birth parents and resolving disputes that arose from online DNA ancestry kits. However, the fact that Joyce had been the only one of the four of them to find paid work meant that a leadership imbalance had emerged.

As in, Joyce had assumed a gloating crow’s nest of a power position over the three other women she was supposed to be partners with.

Emma dropped her backpack beside the multiposition chair in her area of the office. Her nostrils flared, which, because she had a nose ring, made her look every bit the formidable youth leader who had been featured in a Gazette article about her important work in the movement to draw attention to the epidemic of missing Native girls and women. “I’m not the cleaning service,” she said. “My vote is we have Marian call the actual cleaning service, and we come back after they’ve removed the cobwebs.”

“I love that idea, but it’s not going to work,” Marian countered. “The reason I asked you all to come in this morning—”

“Nonsense.” Joyce lifted her chin with an imperious smile. “Fifteen minutes of elbow grease and it will be good as new. Prairie, can I borrow your key to the supply closet?”

Her hand appeared in front of Prairie’s face, open to receive the keys Prairie was expected to fish out of her bag while Greg waited and Emma frowned at both of them and Marian dusted a circle clean on the surface of the conference table, her matte pink lips arranged in a dissatisfied pout that Prairie had seen far too often lately.

“Prayer?” Greg asked. “Are you still with me?”

She was not. She’d been hijacked by a fantasy of walking out of the office and onto the elevator, crossing the lobby, and emerging into the open air. It was early June, nine fifteen in the morning. It wouldn’t be crisp and cool here by the Fox River—more like “muggy with a slight whiff of murk off the water”—but she could still march herself down to the river trail and walk away, heading south until it was just her and the trail geese.

It would be such a relief.

But it would not be the right thing to do.

Prairie tried as hard as she could, as often as she could, to do the next right thing. It was her parents’ fault. They’d raised her in an Oregon cohousing community—essentially a commune—to be a pragmatic idealist focused on the greater good. Prairie had never completely managed to shake this early training.

Running away would help no one. It was time to dig in and communicate.

She located the key ring and gave it to Joyce, who clopped out of the room. “I am still on the line,” Prairie said to Greg. “Did you find the form and fill it out yourself yet, by chance?”

“Mom?” Maelynn must have wrestled the phone from her dad, because her voice was much louder than before. “I think I’d better go home, because Anabel failed driving, and she’s going to need support.”

“She what? How? I thought they were spending the first hour today in an empty parking lot!”

“She hit a pedestrian.”

“She grazed a pedestrian,” Greg corrected in the background. “No one was hurt.”

“But they kicked her out,” Maelynn said. “She got a citation for inattentive driving. I think she won’t want to talk to Dad about it, and you have your meeting. If I go home, I can be there for her.”

“You have to learn differential calculations.”

“Differential calculus,” Maelynn corrected. “I already know how to do it. The professor just teaches us the same things over and over until everybody else understands.”

Prairie did not have a response to that. And yet she had to respond. “Well, it’s important for a gifted learner to spend time with other gifted learners. That’s your thing this morning.” Good. That sounded properly maternal. “Your dad’s thing is filling out the prescreening form, which is on the front page of the camp website. He can google it. Then he can pick up Anabel. He’ll know what to say to make her feel better. That’s not your thing to worry about, all right?”

“All right.” Maelynn sounded dubious. “I don’t want to miss more of the class, though. Everyone turns to look when you’re late.”

“I get it. There’s no reason for you to stick around waiting. Can you give the phone back to your dad and go ahead into class?”

There was a rustling. “Yeah. I’m here.”

“You can sort this out.” Prairie did not say, That’s the fucking job. She didn’t need Greg mad at her on top of everything else. “I have faith in you.”

She hung up.

The office had gone silent. Because Prairie’s phone call had murdered the vibe.

So be it. Maelynn had her thing to do this morning. Greg had his. But Prairie’s thing was this. This office. This agency. It was the first thing she’d done just for herself since she left home and moved to Seattle at seventeen.

She considered the space again. It was a little shabby, sure. But the sunny, five-hundred-square-foot office had newly refinished parquet floors and tasteful furniture customized to the individual needs of every woman in the room. The gold letters on the privacy glass looked sharp.

She had faith in them.

Prairie shoved both palms into the long mass of her dark-brown hair, wound it into a roughly bun-shaped wad not remotely in the same class as Marian’s polished version, and snapped the elastic from her wrist around it. “Let’s talk this out.”

Marian trailed one french-tipped fingernail across the portion of the tabletop she’d cleaned off. “Prairie, you know that I appreciate Joyce’s many contributions to this enterprise. Generally, I enjoy her company. But—”

“That woman’s telling me what to do like I’m the hired help when I own just as much of this company as she does.” Emma crossed her arms. She looked like a teenager. She was a teenager.

And she was right. They had all agreed together to hire the cleaning service. They made decisions unanimously, as equals. That was the deal.

Joyce clomped back in with paper towels, disinfectant, window cleaner, and a bucket of water. Emma shot to her feet. “I’m heading out. Let me know when you want to reschedule.”

“Please don’t.” Prairie held up one hand. “I get it—you’re not here to clean. I understand.”

“Do you? Because I’m also not here to be on speaker with some clueless white guy”—she gave Prairie a pointed look—“or to get a thousand Slack notifications a day that make it seem like we have a business when in reality we are not doing anything.” Now it was Marian’s turn to flinch away from Emma’s critique. “I’ve tried to be accommodating, but if there’s no work, I’m not going to pretend to be a detective. The world’s on fire. I’ve got plenty on my plate.”

Prairie could feel her heartbeat in her palms. “I hear you. I don’t disagree.”

“I do.” Marian’s voice had a blade beneath it. “I am not creating tasks and workflow. I do the kind of stuff no one else wants to do, but if they don’t do it, everything is covered in shit, and a thirteen-year-old girl is in tears.”

Marian’s anger made Prairie feel like she had been grabbed by the throat with an invisible hand. “You know that’s not what Emma meant.”

“So what did she mean?” Joyce asked. “Because what I know from more than forty years of work at the Department of Natural Resources is that no one is going to get anything done talking to each other like this.”

“Shut up,” Prairie and Marian said at the same time.

“I didn’t mean it,” Prairie corrected immediately.

“I meant it,” Marian said. “I’m sick and tired of Joyce lording her work experience and her genealogy jobs over all of us like she’s the secret boss of the agency.”

“You don’t believe I have anything to teach you?” Joyce sounded incredulous.

“You’re not teaching.” Emma whipped her body toward Joyce. “You’re codependently forcing us to behave in a way that serves no purpose, certainly not communication, in order to make yourself feel safer and like everything is okay when everything is obviously a disaster.”

Joyce snapped her gaze to Prairie. “Is that what you think?”

Sister Jesus, deliver me. Prairie was about to say no, of course it wasn’t, but she never had been able to lie to her mother-in-law. “I wouldn’t put it that way.”

“I hear the but. Enlighten me, Prairie. How would you put it?” Joyce dropped into the chair across from her and laid both hands flat on the table, then seemed to remember about the mouse poop and pulled them away, dusting them in the air in front of her wrinkled nose.

Prairie took a big breath. “Look. You know I value your skill set. You helped me so much with the Radcliffe case. I never would have thought to look for violence in Chris Radcliffe’s past or think about how it shaped him. You have contacts all over the state from your time at the DNR, and you know how the bureaucracies work. Your genealogy projects have been keeping Prairie Hawk afloat. But, Joyce, it’s like you’re trying to give us all sunshine enemas. It’s oppressive.”

The last drops of righteousness drained from Joyce’s expression.

“I’m sorry,” Prairie said, tamping down a burst of guilt. “You know how I grew up. There was idealism. We were up in each other’s business constantly. What I learned is that if you actually have a mission, this is what it takes to get it done. Talking to each other. Arguing. Telling the truth. Trying again.”

“Well, if we’re telling the truth, Prairie, I have one for you.” Marian raised an immaculate eyebrow. “Your homelife has been a distraction from building this business.”

“Cosign.” Emma pulled out a chair at the conference table and tossed herself carelessly into it. “A huge, giant distraction.”

“I see.” Prairie pressed her lips together against the sting of this accusation. “I mean, I can’t deny it. My homelife is a distraction. All I wanted to do when I got Marian’s text about this meeting was haul ass over here, but instead I spent almost an hour reassuring Anabel that she absolutely can learn to drive and is not destined to take her currently nonexistent girlfriend to dinner on the city bus.”

Joyce smiled, and Marian’s posture relaxed a fraction.

“Sometimes the constant distraction gets to me,” Prairie went on. “I can’t think in a straight line, and I worry I’m going to scream. I have screamed. It changed nothing, which was unbelievably disappointing.” She looked around the table, meeting the eyes of each of her partners. “The only thing I’ve ever figured out that does change things is talking about what’s not working and asking for help.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to say.” Marian leaned toward her. “We do need help. We have to get money coming in. You know I’ve been more than willing to take the cheating cases. But even without them—”

“No,” Emma interrupted. “Not this again. If we take a cheating case, best-case scenario, we do a great job exposing some jackhole’s gross behavior, and we end up with a whole bunch of satisfied clients giving word-of-mouth recommendations to other women with cheating husbands. Then that’s all we ever get to do, and what happens to our victim focus?”

Prairie could appreciate Emma’s concern. On the other hand, it didn’t do any good for them to be here for victims if no one came to the door. Even the Chris Radcliffe murder case wasn’t a feather the agency could put in its cap, because Prairie had agreed not to reveal her part in it to the public. She’d made this arrangement with FBI agent Foster Rosemare—but maybe it had been a rash promise on Prairie’s part, fueled by the way it felt when he’d kissed her that one time.

One time.

Who knew that a newly minted PI who was also a divorced mother of two and a widowed FBI agent who was always working would have trouble connecting?

She and Foster knew. It turned out there was nothing like busy and preoccupying lives to serve as an excuse for avoiding feeling feelings for the first time in years.

“Emma’s got a good point,” she said, dragging her attention back to the topic at hand.

“Thank you,” Emma said. “I appreciate the backup.”

“Of course. I count on you to keep our values front and center. I trust you because you’re always willing to speak up for what’s right, and I know your podcast reaches a huge audience of people who amplify your message.” Emma’s stiff jawline was beginning to soften. Everyone liked being validated. Prairie had learned this parenting teenagers.

“And I also trust Marian,” she added, “because she’s been helping me manage my complex, distracting household for a long time, so I know how smart and how good at organizing people she is. We wouldn’t be in this office if it weren’t for Marian’s connections in this community. We wouldn’t have our PI licenses, much less a business license and an ironclad set of contracts. I think if we did take infidelity cases, we could count on Marian not to let us get stuck doing that forever.”

Emma sighed. “It’s possible my fear that all of this was a trash fire made me want it to be a trash fire, just so I could be angry and right. I’m not proud of that, but it’s how I’m made.”

Joyce drew in a deep breath. “I thought I was simply helping Prairie Hawk by taking all the genealogy jobs, but I can admit to . . . lording it over you three. It felt good to be the best one again. Retirement is hard. I’ve still got a lot of wounds I’m licking from surviving in a male-dominated sector. And I’m a lot less patient than I let people think.”

“No one thinks you’re patient.” Marian grinned. “I think you’re stylish, but patient? No.” She turned to Prairie. “You. Stop it.”

“Sorry? Stop what?”

“That.” Marian drew a circle around Prairie with one acrylic fingertip. “Gloating that your hippie commune Jedi tricks worked.”

Prairie schooled her expression into something more properly serious. “I’m not gloating.”

“You are,” Emma said. “Which is wild, because you’ve been hiding in your burrow from the inevitable consequences of every single change you made in your life, including whatever that thing was with the FBI guy, and now you’ve said onething about facing the hard stuff and got us to talk. That does not make you the savant of workplace healing.”

Prairie wanted to be offended by this characterization of her behavior for the past year, but it was a fair shot. She had been hiding in her burrow. Her skittishness about starting down the road to a serious romantic relationship again meant that she’d been holding her thing with the FBI guy at the stage her daughter Anabel called “talking.”

“But ‘savant of workplace healing’ is such a good title,” she complained. “I could get it engraved on my desk plate.”

“Prairie.” Joyce said this with a tone infused with long knowledge of Prairie’s ways.

“Yes. Understood and acknowledged.” She shook out her hands. “I had so much faith, you know? I’d finally convinced myself there was something I could do better than anyone else, and I only needed to surround myself with people who did what they did better than anyone else, and then . . .” She stopped. Her ears were ringing.

“And then?” Marian asked.

“And then. That’s all. And then.”

They sat with that for a minute.

“Maybe marketing is in order,” Joyce suggested.

“Like a bat signal?” Emma swung her legs over the arm of her chair. “Or posters that appear in the night that say only trouble? in all caps, with a QR code.”

“If we could be serious for just a minute,” Marian said, “I do have something important I need to discuss with all of you before—”

The door to the office swung open, and a small blond woman of indeterminate age walked through it dressed like an extra in a postapocalyptic desert movie filmed in a bombed-out LA.

“Well, well, well. We meet at last.” Her raspy voice sounded amused to be in the presence of four women who did nothing but stare at her.

Their visitor took off a canvas fedora and shoved it under her bare arm. She pushed dark-rimmed designer glasses up her nose and shook back perfectly highlighted hair. Her icy-blue eyes, surrounded by overtanned wrinkles, settled on Prairie. “Aren’t you the one who figured out that rich developer fuckwit did his wife?”

Prairie jumped like the question was a gun pointed at her heart. “Um. Yes?”

“What’s the deal? You guys don’t like money? Because people keep dying in the one place on earth I love, and no one gives a rat’s ass. It’s really pissing me off. You want to hear about this job?”

Prairie gazed into the woman’s eyes. She watched her ribs rise and fall with breath beneath her white tank top. After she’d confirmed in every way she could that this person was absolutely real and not a hallucination conjured up by the morning’s unbelievable tension, she let out a breath and answered the question. “Yes. Definitely. Please.”

“This is what I’ve been trying to prep you guys for, if you would’ve let me get a word in.” Marian rose from the table, slid open the drawer of her blessedly immaculate desk, and extracted the expensive iPad and stylus she’d requisitioned for client intake forms. “Our visitor has been leaving a lot of messages, and to be honest . . .” Marian glanced at the woman, who, confusingly, saluted her in reply. “I was somewhat hesitant to return them.”

“Because I sounded like someone calling from a booby-trapped prepper’s basement?” The woman’s crooked smile was wildly compelling.

“Something like that. But on the last message, she finally left her name. And that’s when I called her back.”

Now the visitor looked at Prairie, her eyes bright with amusement. “Because I’m rich, and everyone around here knows my name.”

Marian tapped on the tablet’s screen with her stylus. “Your checks will cash, yes. That is, if we decide to take your case. Everyone, meet Bernie Dubicki.”

Joyce gasped.

Emma low-whistled.

Only Prairie didn’t respond.

She’d never heard of Bernie Dubicki.

Marian smiled at the team. “Now you know why I called the meeting. Bernie, tell us what we need to know to decide if Prairie Hawk Investigations will take you on as our client.”

Prairie schooled her features into something she hoped resembled focused attention while her wildly beating heart tried to smash through her sternum.

Whoever Bernie Dubicki turned out to be, Prairie was certain this woman was the stroke of luck she’d been hoping for.

End of except

---

Trailbreaker Authors Ruthie Knox and Annie Mare