Joe L. Hensley's Snowbird's Blood is a classically noir novel about justice, retribution, aging - and the dark underside of society.
Cannert is searching throughout Florida for his missing wife, Martha. While he was in the hospital, coping with the latest round of treatment for his terminal cancer, Martha was in Florida looking for an appropriate place for the two of them to retire and for him to die. When he recovered enough to get out of the hospital, Martha had disappeared without a trace. Unsure whether she'd simply left him, whether she'd been killed along the road in Florida, or something else more sinister, Cannert is on a slow search of the likely places she might have stopped, looking into rumors and quiet whispers of old people - aka 'snowbirds' - disappearing.
While he searches, a woman found badly abused, near death, with a massive head injury, slowly recovers in a mental hospital. She remembers almost nothing, only knowing someone out there is looking for her. And, with no knowledge of who she is, and where she can go, she goes on the run from a shadowy man that she spies watching her from outside the hospital's fence.