-
“If you read for pleasure, there’s probably more pleasure per inch in Pickard’s work than almost any other current crime novelist.”
Cleveland Plain Dealer -
“Pickard has evolved into a novelist of substantial literary power.”
The Denver Post
The Setting
From Chapter 15 . . .
“In spite of her urgent need for better coffee, she took an alternate route to town so she could drive past a local landmark, a set of famous rock monuments that rose high above the ground, looking like a natural, bigger, taller Stonehenge, a startling contrast to the rest of the flat landscape. Testament Rocks, as they were known, attracted about the only tourists her county ever saw—archeologists, geologists, and paleontologists, for the most part. A great inland sea had once surged through this area, an enormous body of water replete with prehistoric sharks and other seafaring creatures; later, a vast river took its place. Just to look at Testament Rocks gave Annabelle the sense of being part of something bigger, something almost incomprehensibly old that changed so slowly the alterations were nearly imperceptible unless you watched them for a lifetime. Only erosion, pollution, earthquakes, or dynamite could alter this landscape; cataclysmic change came rarely, but it did come now and then.”