Ray Slaverson, a world-weary Florida police detective, has his hands full with the murders of two attorneys and a third suspicious death, all within twenty-four hours. Ray doesn’t believe in coincidences, but he can’t find a single link between the dead men, and he and his partner soon smash into an investigative stonewall.
Kate Garcia, Ray’s fiancée, knows more than she should. She helped one of the dead attorneys, just hours before he took a bullet to the head, study an old newspaper in the library where she works. Kate might be the only person still alive who knows what he was digging up—except for his killer.
When Kate starts trying to discover what’s behind the murders, she turns up disturbing links between the three dead men that track back to her family’s troubled past. But she has plenty of reasons to keep her mouth shut. Her discovery unleashes a cat-and-mouse game that threatens to sink her and those she loves in a high tide of danger.
“Though I’ve long been a fan of Claire Matturro, her latest blew me away. Her lyrical depictions of the Gulf Coast landscape, the densely layered story where the intertwining of past and present creates a resonance that only our best novelists achieve, the narrative that is at once, scary, gripping, moving, and populated by unforgettable characters, combine to make Smuggler’s Daughter as good a novel as I’ve read in years.” ~ James W. Hall, Edgar and Shamus winning author.
“The Smuggler’s Daughter is an intoxicating and pulsating thriller that I literally couldn’t put down. With rich and unforgettable characters, a complex and twisty plot and an authentic Gulf Coast setting that has you tasting the salt air, Claire Matturro has crafted a story that will keep you up into the wee hours of the night and leave you sad that it’s over when you reach the final page.” ~-Robert Bailey, bestselling author of the McMurtrie & Drake Legal Thrillers series and Bocephus Haynes series.