Ava and her lab have received a grant to solve ten cold cases in rural Colorado using modern forensics techniques. The director of the CBI was irritated by the irregularities of their last case (see "Little Girl Blue"). He assigns Ava and her team the coldest of cold cases — an unpopular Senator was killed by RPG shot under his limousine after he left Aspen, Colorado. The perpetrator shot the RPG and slipped into the forest never to be seen again. The fire burned for more than an hour, destroying all forensic material. To make matters worse, the case is thirty years old.

While Seth is in the hospital, Ava and her team work their way through a bounty of useless forensics until they begin to work their way through the crime to find the killers. Seth and Ava solve mysteries in Denver, Colorado.

Claudia Hall Christian writes great stories about good people caught in difficult times. She specializes in complicated mysteries, page-turning thrillers, and the longest running serial fiction.