Bestselling author Robert Dugoni is back with the ninth installment in his highly acclaimed Tracy Crosswhite series, WHAT SHE FOUND, following IN HER TRACKS and the novella THE LAST LINE.

Since we last saw her, Tracy has taken a position as the sole detective in the Seattle Police Department's Cold Case Unit following an extended maternity leave that became a PTSD leave. This comes after a decade in the Violent Crimes Section, along with fellow A Team members (and fan favorites) Kinsington “Kins” Rowe, Delmo “Del” Castigliano and Vic “Faz” Fazzio. The move is ostensibly to grant her more time with her husband, Dan, and newborn daughter Daniella. However, as longtime readers of the series know, Tracy is nothing without a hard case to solve, and although cold cases tend to be just that --- cold --- it is not long before she finds herself investigating a decades-old crime with serious open ends.

"The fact that there’s a truly gripping mystery, full of corruption, murder and scandal, at the heart of the book to push and propel our protagonist into new realms is just the icing on the cake."

Investigative journalist Lisa Childress disappeared 25 years ago while following a lead for an article. A brilliant autistic woman, she was one of her paper’s most celebrated reporters, which meant that she was often allowed to keep her subjects under wraps until she was done writing about them. As a result, no one knows who Lisa was meeting that night or even what she was investigating. Although her car was found abandoned near a Greyhound station with her blood on the steering wheel, the only apparent lead was her husband, David, who recently had gone into extreme debt and taken out a substantial life insurance policy. The lead investigator at the time, Moss Gunderson, pursued David relentlessly but was never able to make an arrest.

As the star of the Seattle PD, Tracy is accustomed to victims’ families pleading with her to reopen old cases. But when Anita, Lisa’s adult daughter, approaches her, she is drawn to the motherless girl and promises to look into the case. Unlike the initial investigators, Anita has done her due diligence, narrowing down her mother’s files to four cases that she was in the middle of investigating at the time of her disappearance: a corrupt mayor, a sexually abusive city council member, a police task force that was allegedly skimming money from drug busts, and even a serial killer. Those accustomed to Tracy’s typical case load will no doubt be drawn to the corrupt mayor and serial killer, but what she finds as she investigates each lead surprises even her.

Through her trademark steadfast detective work and know-how, Tracy learns that around the time that Lisa disappeared, a boat in a nearby marina was raided by a masked but military-like team. According to men who lived and worked at the boatyard at that time, the boat was known to smuggle drugs valued in the millions of dollars, yet Tracy can find no record of any raids…and a raid like that would be both documented and celebrated. She becomes suspicious of Moss Gunderson, a bombastic blowhard, but a name on one of the initial reports from Lisa’s case shocks her: Delmo Castigliano.

There are serious flaws in the investigation, as well as a concurrent “suicide” of a man connected to the marina, but Tracy knows that Del would never go along with corruption. Or would he? With Del uncharacteristically silent, the new police chief pushing for Tracy to take part in political press conferences, and a creeping suspicion that Lisa may not be missing after all, she will have to forge ahead alone, with only a dead man, a prisoner who won’t talk on the record, and a stoned hippie to support her.

Amazingly, Dugoni only gets better and better with each release. Whereas the last few entries in the series have focused on Tracy’s personal and career growth, WHAT SHE FOUND feels like coming home in the sense that readers get to see her doing what she does best, mostly on her own, with only her stellar instincts to guide her. In implicating one of her dearest friends (and a true reader favorite), Dugoni still “goes there” without pushing an unnecessarily gruesome or terrifying crime, a much-needed reprieve after the last few years of real-life trauma.

But don’t let the lack of gore or jumpscares fool you. Tracy is every bit as cunning and resilient as she has always been, but now with the power and wisdom of motherhood to push her into new depths of loyalty-testing and strength. The fact that there’s a truly gripping mystery, full of corruption, murder and scandal, at the heart of the book to push and propel our protagonist into new realms is just the icing on the cake.

Although WHAT SHE FOUND can be read as a stand-alone, I implore readers to begin with MY SISTER’S GRAVE --- not only for continuity’s sake, but to fully understand Tracy Crosswhite and how far she’s come, and to witness the full breadth of Robert Dugoni’s brilliant crime writing.