The Smuggler’s Daughter

Ray Slaverson, a world-weary Florida police detective, has his hands full with the murders of two attorneys and a third suspicious death, all within twenty-four hours. Ray doesn’t believe in coincidences, but he can’t find a single link between the dead men, and he and his partner soon smash into an investigative stone wall.

Kate Garcia, Ray’s fiancée, knows more than she should. She helped one of the dead attorneys, just hours before he took a bullet to the head, study an old newspaper in the library where she works. Kate might be the only person still alive who knows what he was digging up—except for his killer.

When Kate starts trying to discover what’s behind the murders, she turns up disturbing links between the three dead men that track back to her family’s troubled past. But she has plenty of reasons to keep her mouth shut. Her discovery unleashes a cat-and-mouse game that threatens to sink her and those she loves in a high tide of danger.

Categories: , , , Product ID: 3339

Description

ISBN-13: 978-1-948051-51-4

Publication Date: July 7, 2020

About the Author

Claire Matturro was raised on tales of errant, unhinged kith and kin, whiskey making, ghosts, and the War Between the States—in other words, classic Southern Gothic tales befitting her Alabama and Florida Gulf Coast roots. Inspired by such stories, she wanted to be a novelist but pursued more gainful and steady employment first. Which is to say that she has been a newspaper reporter and a lawyer and taught at Florida State University College of Law and as a visiting professor of legal writing at the University of Oregon School of Law. Claire and her husband, Bill, also own an organic blueberry farm in Georgia, where they lived for many years.

After the lawyering years, Claire returned to her love of storytelling and began writing fiction. Her big break came when a vice-president at HarperCollins took a chance on Claire’s comedic legal thriller set on the Gulf Coast of Florida. The resulting Lilly Belle Cleary series of books won several awards. These days, Claire is writing more serious fiction but still with an eye toward the Florida Gulf Coast, where she, her husband, and their rescue cat now thrive. Claire remains active in writers’ groups and environmental groups and, as an avid reader and reviewer, regularly contributes to Southern Literary Review and Compulsive Reader.

 

Visit Claire’s Author Page