Bone Orchard

Former police captain turned private investigator Ellie Cook is still rebuilding her life on the Oregon coast. Chronic pain, addiction recovery, and the fragile stability she has with her partner, Dr. Alexa Mendoza, are already a lot to juggle. When a shallow grave is uncovered at the Tillamook Creamery expansion site and quickly dismissed as "historical," Ellie knows something is wrong. The family of a missing dairy worker, Rafael Domínguez, comes to her for answers that the county refuses to give.

Following the trail of Rafael's last days, Ellie enters a world of industrial dairy farms, unsafe working conditions, and environmental violations buried in paperwork and fear. The deeper she digs, the more she uncovers a dangerous network of corruption tying together local politics, corporate profit, and lives that are treated as disposable. As her investigation pushes powerful people into the light, Ellie's body and mind begin to buckle under the strain. Her reliance on Oxy and Xanax grows harder to ignore, even as she pushes herself to bring Rafael home.

Set against the stormy backdrop of the Oregon coast, Bone Orchard is a gritty, character-driven crime novel about justice that is never clean, truth that comes with a price, and a PI who keeps going anyway. Fans of coastal noir, flawed but determined heroines, and mystery novels with emotional depth will find plenty to hold onto in this second book of the Cook Investigations series.