The Boundary Stone

A woman disappears from her property line. A boundary dispute that has been running for three years. And a retired schoolteacher who spent three months quietly building a case that someone very much wanted her to stop building.

When Ruth Calloway fails to come home after walking her fence line on a November afternoon, Sergeant Cole Whitaker of the Pine Ridge Police Department follows the boot prints into the frost and finds a case that is not what it first appears.

The disputed boundary between the Calloway property and their neighbor's land is only the surface of it. Beneath it: a private investment scheme, an unannounced county infrastructure plan, and a trail of documents that Ruth Calloway had been assembling - carefully, methodically, the way a librarian assembles a record - before someone decided she had gotten too close.

In Pine Ridge, everyone knows the land. The roads, the drainage patterns, the places where the ground is reliable and the places where it is not. It is a town where the past is always present and the lines that were drawn eighty years ago still determine what belongs to whom.

Cole Whitaker knows all of it. What he is learning, one case at a time, is how far back the shape of things actually goes.

The Boundary Stone is the second book in The Pine Ridge Files, a series of crime novels set in rural Pennsylvania. It stands alone - everything you need is here.