Booked All Night: Innocence Road by Laura Griffin

Image Credit: Laura Griffin/Berkley

Detective Leanne Everhart swore she’d never go back to her hometown near Marfa, Texas—but she returns when her brother needs her, only to find a town in need too, still torn apart by a decades-old crime.

Leanne Everhart knows women have something to fear in her artsy hometown, especially so if they’re not rich, white locals. Returning to town after her father’s death, she sees the ugliest sides of an area that draws people for its severe, untamed natural landscape.

While her department faces mounting backlash over a recent wrongful conviction in the long-ago murder case of a popular local teenager—which is now unsolved—Leanne is called to a fresh crime scene at the edge of the desert. A nameless woman was found murdered, with no clues as to her identity. As Leanne digs into the crime scene evidence, she grows convinced this latest murder case is linked with the local teenager’s murder. And to multiple cold cases, all unnamed female victims, that have all been shelved by her department without leads.

Now, with conflicted loyalties and without allies, Leanne must hunt down a serial killer, one who’s been preying on local women for two decades, growing bolder and more ruthless with every strike.

If Laura Griffin writes it, I am reading it. I don’t need the blurb, or a title, or any idea what it’s about, and I am reading it. And read it I did, as I devoured this and finished it in less than 2 days.

If it wasn’t already obvious, I enjoy her writing, the way she tells a story, and I am fully invested in the story by about the second sentence of one of her books. This one was no exception. I wanted to know what was going on and how it was going to evolve pretty much immediately.

This title felt current, but in a way that it takes things that are being talked about in the world, and makes them matter in a way that isn’t abstract, but human and real, like it was a story about the consequences of forgetting that others matter.

The romance in this title was less of a focus than in other books, but at the same time there was an element of it, but it took more of a backseat to the story. And in this one, it worked. This book had a lot to say and it says it well.

And, somehow, in the midst of all of this, I still managed to be somewhat surprised by the ending.

I enjoyed and recommend this title.