Lauren Dawes

Just when Jaymee Ballard’s life seems to be on track, a massive derecho attacks the Delta Crossroads sowing destruction in its path. Her boyfriend, investigative journalist Nick Samuels, comes up missing, and she fears the worst.

Nick’s abandoned car contains evidence of his involvement uncovering a controversial case mired in political power and greed. While her friend and local detective, Cage Foster, heads up the inquiry into Nick’s kidnapping, Jaymee finds it impossible to sit back and do nothing.

Enlisting the help of her best friend, Dani Evans, Jaymee discovers a trail leading to the dangerous and secretive Dixie Mafia. Facing a fraudulent Confederate artifact scheme, dark local history, and a powerful enemy lurking in the shadows, the two friends find themselves holding the key to not only Nick’s disappearance, but a shameful town secret someone will kill to protect.

Genre: Psychological Thriller

Length: 306 pages

This is the final book in Green’s Delta Crossroads Trilogy, and just like the first two books, Ashes and Bone doesn’t disappoint. Right from the beginning, the reader is sucked into the world Green has created. In this story, all the main players are brought back into play, working together to follow the trail of breadcrumbs left behind by Jaymee’s boyfriend, Nick Samuals. His disappearance may have seemed random at first, but the more Jaymee digs, the more she finds out about the story Nick had been chasing.

As always, Green’s love of history and the south comes through in her books. The amount of detail and dedication to getting all those little features historically correct means that the reader can see just how much research she has put into her book. I found that the more I read, the more I was trying to guess which suspects were guilty and which were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Green weaves a seamless tale, and it’s her characters that carry it forward and help it to develop, help it to become believable. The only thing that detracted from the story for me was the number of characters. Sometimes I found it difficult keeping up with who’s who as the tangled web of intrigued slowly unravels. 

The plot is really well-paced, with no part of it that could be considered either too fast or too slow. Green keeps the reader in suspense, letting more and more details of the backstory trickle into the storyline, keeping you guessing with clues and red herrings to lead you to draw one conclusion when it’s really another.

I’d highly recommend this book to anyone who loves suspense novels with just a hint of love and romance thrown in. Green’s characters are well-rounded, the world she creates is enchanting and the overall plotlines of all three books will keep you guessing.