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, 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.

My Review:

I had missed the first book in the Prairie Nightingale series, Homemaker, when it came out last year. I have to confess that I probably bounced right off that title and didn’t look more deeply. (I REALLY don’t do domestic.)

BUT, then I saw this tour, and did look more closely at the authors’ names and remembered that I loved both their books (About Last Night for Knox and The Story Guy for Mare writing as Mary Ann Rivers) but hadn’t picked up on anything new in a while. So I went back and picked up Homemaker and I absolutely ADORED it.

Clearly, you can’t judge a book by either its cover OR its title – and I should know better. (Not that I can’t be tempted by an intriguing one or the other.)

Trailbreaker picks up right where Homemaker left off. Well, sorta/kinda. Because it’s been a year for them, and not nearly as productive or profitable a year as they’d hoped. Prairie, Marian, Joyce and Emma started Prairie Hawk Investigations on a high after the successful – if tragic – conclusion of the Radcliffe case in Homemaker.

But they couldn’t use that case as a way of drumming up business. The credit went to law enforcement, and Prairie agreed not to talk about her contribution. A contribution without which the case would NEVER have been solved. But that’s Prairie all over.

Only the people who know about Prairie’s involvement well, know. Along with some people who made it their business to know. And that’s where Bernie Dubicki comes in.

Bernie, an eccentric, wealthy, resident of Door County Wisconsin, KNOWS in her gut that something is wrong in HER county. But she can’t put her finger on exactly what – and neither can the legions of fans who follow her “Back Door” online newsletter and gossip sheet.

But Bernie has money to burn and Prairie Hawk desperately needs a new, paying, client so they can clean the literal mouse poop out of their office. Bernie thinks she’s going to run the investigation and micromanage Prairie Hawk every step of the way, because she’s a steamroller with a bee in her bonnet and that’s pretty much her modus operandi for living.

So she’s not surprised that Prairie Hawk takes her case – after all, her retainer check is going to keep them afloat for months and she knows it. But she is surprised – and eventually (EVENTUALLY!) respectful – when Prairie Nightingale takes the reins. Bernie hired them for their principles. But a LOT of their principles are firmly wrapped in standing their own ground and investigating a case their own way – regardless of what the client demands.

As much as the agency needs Bernie’s money, they’re not willing to compromise themselves or their ethics for it. That ground is hard won for all of them, and they’re not ceding it to a rich woman looking for validation of her pet conspiracy theories.

Which doesn’t mean that Bernie’s wrong about most – if not all of what she’s fixated on. There is something going on – including but not limited to incompetence or rug sweeping or corruption on the part of the Door County Sheriff’s department stretching back decades.

It’s going to take Prairie Hawk Investigations and every single resource they can bring to bear – especially themselves – to unknot the tangled web of coincidences, mysterious thefts, murders ruled accidents, and missing women to get to the heart of what – or who – has gone wrong in Door County’s backwoods.

And the clock is ticking, because the last victim of whatever or whoever this is, is still missing, PRESUMED dead a year after she disappeared. Miray Küçükgenç might still be alive. But the clock is ticking and it’s getting so loud that Prairie herself can’t stop hearing it. She’s determined to bring Miray home – whatever it takes and whoever it takes down along the way.

Escape Rating A: Trailbreaker was even better than Homemaker, which is saying something because I LOVED Homemaker a whole lot. What makes this one better, IMHO, is that Homemaker was, of necessity, a whole lot of setup for the series and for Prairie’s detective agency, Prairie Hawk Investigations.

THIS story is all about their first investigation as an official team. And it’s a doozy. (It was also so damn compelling – or compulsive – that as much as I was REALLY enjoying the audiobook narrated by Mia Hutchinson-Shaw, I couldn’t stop myself from continuing each day’s listen with even more reading. In the end I read as much as I listened. The audio was TERRIFIC, but reading is FAST.)

Part of what captivated me was the way that it grounds itself in what’s gone before while still moving forward. And I’m saying that even though that means that the place where this second book starts is with that ground in a bit of a hard freeze.

Because Prairie Hawk isn’t doing all that well a year after the events in Homemaker – and for reasons that are realistic on multiple levels. It’s not just that Prairie gave away the opportunity to publicize their foundational achievement in the Radcliffe case, but that her need to solve the puzzle, provide closure for the family, and especially to accommodate law enforcement, is very much part and parcel of how women are socialized. She’s expected to step back, and she does even though she already knows she shouldn’t.

And that issue is part of what makes Prairie Hawk’s contracts so stringent when it comes to standing their own ground, because it’s hard for all of them.

Also, for the past year, Prairie has let herself get dragged back into the self-effacing and self-erasing patterns of attending to every domestic crisis in her own household and not training her ex-husband to take the times and dates and responsibilities he AGREED to at the start of the business. The constant interruptions to Prairie’s time and derailments of Prairie’s business plans and work have consumed the agency – and it’s up to her not to keep falling into that.

We understand why she does because those old roles are comfortably familiar (if not always comfortable in any other sense) in a way that being the leader of her own business is not. But she’s exasperated her colleagues to the point where Bernie’s self-motivated intervention drops like a bomb into the middle of Prairie Hawk’s “come-to-Jesus” meeting with Prairie Nightingale about the way her domestic distractions are distracting their entire enterprise.

Which, by a circuitous route, leads back to the mouse poop on the conference room table and the team’s varying, but typical for each individual, reactions to it.

Bernie Dubicki serves as the team’s wake-up call in multiple ways. First and most obvious, she has a case for them, and enough money to make them think more than twice about doing anything other than taking it.

Bernie, herself is actually the biggest drawback to the case, almost but not quite enough to outweigh the size of her bankroll. On the one hand, Bernie’s very up front with the fact that she was looking for an all-woman detective agency that would actually LISTEN to her, because law enforcement clearly is not.

OTOH, Bernie is a steamroller, which is part of why law enforcement isn’t listening to her. If she were a man, her steamroller tendencies would be seen as the strength of conviction, but in a woman it’s all chalked up to over-reacting and a need for attention. (We’ve ALL heard that one before IRL.) At the same time, there’s a clear undercurrent that Bernie knows that Prairie Hawk is desperate for a case, and figures she can steamroller them into investigating HER pet theories and following HER lead and being HER mouthpiece.

So while Bernie’s case is the making of Prairie Hawk Investigation in a lot of ways, this case also prods Bernie into a whole lot of changes of her own. Not so much the making of Bernie as the remaking of Bernie with a bit more understanding of the people around her.

But it’s the case that keeps the reader following along with Prairie, possibly trying to put a foot on an imaginary accelerator for the story every bit as much and as often as Prairie is trying to pump on an imaginary brake when her daughter is driving – after said daughter side-swiped a pedestrian in her first attempt at taking her driving test.

The case is, just as the agency and the story itself are, female-centric, female-forward and female-focused. While it’s the last victim (so far and Prairie’s hoping to keep it that way) that has Prairie’s mom-senses tingling, the whole chain of crimes is not as equal opportunity as it appears on the surface in a really terrible way. Both men and women get robbed and murdered along this criminal’s path. But the men just get killed – the women get abducted and held, somewhere, for days or weeks or in the last case nearly a year so far. All the murders get chalked up to death by misadventure or accident, this missing persons cases get labelled as ‘running away’, but in the case of the women’s murders or disappearances evidence gets outright ignored that doesn’t fit the easiest theory.

It’s up to Prairie and her team to take Bernie’s conspiracy theories and set them aside, while still investigating the individual crimes that stretch back decades, to do the coordination that law enforcement seemingly can’t or won’t. Which they do. And it’s an absolute blast to watch them work, struggle with their internal issues and team-building, and work some more.

And get the job that no one else has managed to do, done. In time to save one missing young woman, while bringing closure to a whole bunch of grieving families AND putting the guilty behind bars.

Two final notes as I close. There’s one thing that nagged at me, and I recognize that it’s very much a ‘me’ thing but still. The ending of Prairie Hawk’s case was just right. It provided the best outcome for the victims and their families, rescuing the girl who could still be rescued, closing out several missing persons cases, providing a kind of emotional restitution to families who were told their loved one had committed suicide when they’d been murdered, etc., etc., along with putting Prairie Hawk Investigations back in the black and hopefully on track.

But I missed a scene I desperately wanted, where all those law enforcement agencies who did a ton of rug sweeping got hauled onto the carpet by someone and accepted – or rejected – delivery of a righteous lecture detailing just how badly they all effed up. Because they did. (Unless, of course, Prairie Hawk’s caseload is going to get built on picking up after law enforcement’s rug sweeping and effing up and in that case never mind.) I still wanted to see that message delivered by someone, even if it had to be FBI Agent Foster Rosemare and his semi-retired intelligence agent dad.

Second, I do enjoy the understated, hesitant, step forward and back romance between Prairie and Foster Rosemare. I’m not saying they should pick up the pace because it feels right this way under their circumstances. But there’s starting to be a feeling that what’s keeping the pace so slow is at least partly the long arm of coincidence inserting interruptions and taking him out of town at critical moments. That long arm can get brittle if it gets too long and starts seeming too coincidental. It’s not there yet but it is getting there. (My two cents and your reading mileage may vary.)

All in very much all in this case, I had an excellent reading/listening time with Prairie Nightingale and Trailbreaker. I wasn’t ready to let this book end at all – no matter how much I raced to find out how it ended. Which means that I’m thrilled that the next book in the series, Believer, is coming in September. I’m already looking forward to it.

I hope I’ve teased you sufficiently that you’ll give Prairie Nightingale’s investigations a try. And if you’d like to take another metaphorical tromp through the Door County backwoods after you finish Trailbreaker, take a look at Annelise Ryan’s Monster Hunter Mysteries, starting with A Death in Door County. Just something to tide you over while, like me, you’re itching for Prairie Hawk’s next case.

~~~~~~ TOURWIDE GIVEAWAY ~~~~~~

TOUR PARTICIPANTS

February 4 – Books1987 – SPOTLIGHT

February 5 – Jody’s Bookish Haven – SPOTLIGHT

February 5 – Baroness Book Trove – SPOTLIGHT 

February 6 – Books, Ramblings, and Tea – SPOTLIGHT

February 7 – MJB Reviewers – SPOTLIGHT

February 7 – StoreyBook Reviews – SPOTLIGHT

February 8 – Boys’ Mom Reads! – SPOTLIGHT

February 9 – Angel’s Book Nook – SPOTLIGHT

February 10 – FUONLYKNEW – SPOTLIGHT

February 10 – Escape With Dollycas Into A Good Book – REVIEW

February 11 – Ascroft, eh? – CHARACTER INTERVIEW

February 12 – Reading Reality – REVIEW

February 12 – Sapphyria’s Book Reviews – SPOTLIGHT

February 13 – Novels Alive – REVIEW

February 14 – Sarah Can’t Stop Reading Books – REVIEW 

February 15 – The Mystery of Writing – SPOTLIGHT

February 16 – Sarandipity’s – SPOTLIGHT

February 16 – Maureen’s Musings – SPOTLIGHT

February 17 – Deal Sharing Aunt – AUTHOR INTERVIEW