The Orange Door: A Sutton and Voss Detective Mystery

Some marriages do not end. They get settled.Behind a row of orange doors at a roadside motel in rural Michigan, a woman and a man are found shot in Room 28. The purse arranged on the nightstand belongs to Linda Ferris, a long way from home and nowhere she was supposed to be.Her husband Eddie is a semi-retired financial consultant who has spent twenty-two years managing Linda the way he manages a portfolio. He is calm on the telephone. He is calm at the funeral. He is calm when the detectives come back a second time, and that composure is the first thing about him that does not add up.Detective Ray Sutton has worked homicide for more than thirty years and has been catastrophically certain exactly once. He has never forgiven himself for it. His partner, Carla Voss, hears something in the Ferris marriage that no evidence sheet can hold: the small grammar of a woman who learned to make herself smaller before anyone thought to ask her to. Voss knows that sound. She lived inside it once.And there is Angela Reyes, who runs a women's shelter and once turned a woman away for lack of a bed and read about her death afterward. Angie has decided she will not be careful this time. She begins asking her own questions, off the record and well outside the law, and she gets closer to Eddie Ferris than anyone investigating him should ever get.Everyone working this case is running on a story they believe. Every one of those stories is missing the same piece.Because the file on Linda Ferris is thorough, and signed, and wrong.The Orange Door is the first Sutton and Voss detective mystery, a patient, fairly played crime novel about coercive control, wrongful certainty, and the years of quiet damage that make a killing possible. Every clue is on the page before the answer is. Nothing stays where you left it.For readers who like their mysteries cold-blooded and character-deep, told in part by the man who did it.