YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE UP TO YOUR NECK IN ALLIGATORS—ONE’S ENOUGH.

Scrappy investigative reporter Deuce Mora is certainly no stranger to dangerous situations—or to getting her clock cleaned, for that matter—but waking up in a swamp next to a plane crash with no memory of how she got there is a whole other order of magnitude.

It’s a measure of her desperation that she considers placing her trust in the mysterious swamp hermit with a marginally familiar face who says he needs to hide her in his cabin to protect her from the search helicopters circling above.

Talk about a rock and a hard place! The helicopters belong to the agents of what passes for law and order in Joe Pye County—all of whom are rottener than last Easter’s undiscovered eggs and under the thumb of an unimaginably sadistic, corrupt sheriff. And whatever is going on, it’s bigger than one off-the-rails sheriff in Joe Pye County—maybe as big as the highest Illinois officials—and it leaks over into Kentucky.

If Deuce ever gets out of this alive, she’ll have a lot to answer for to both her editor at the paper (who, it turns out, pointedly instructed her not to go to Joe Pye County) and her fiancé, Mark, who did not sign on for Deuce’s daredevil shenanigans. They’re both near the end of their respective ropes.

Deuce, however, hasn’t got the story yet. And it’s not merely that the case matters to her—a lot—as a reporter, but also, the more she pursues it, the more she discovers links to an earlier story she thought was dead and buried, a case that was deeply personal. But will her commitment to putting the story to rest cost her both her job and her hopes of having a family?

A perfect fit for those who love tough-minded sleuths who’re good in a fight, Deuce is a must-listen for admirers of get-the-story-or-die reporters like Hank Philippi Ryan’s Jane Ryland and Kelly Lange’s Maxi Poole. Odds are she could hold her own with kick-ass female detective protagonists like Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone and Laura Lippman’s Tess Monaghan. Fans of Chicago private investigators VI Warshawski and Libby Hellman’s Georgia Davis will feel right at home on Deuce’s home turf.