Rachael and D.C. Stroeb are introduced to us in the Prologue this disturbing tale as they return from Madrid to their mansion in Miami Beach. They visited their 22 year old son Jeremy who refused to return to Florida with them. Jeremy dropped out of college in his senior year and left home abruptly. Full of angst, Jeremy did not know what he wanted to do or who he was. In fact, he was running from his father from whom he could never receive approval. Their daughter, Elise, asked to go to the neighbor’s for a short visit with her boyfriend but D.C. angrily refused as it was late in the evening. Racheal and D.C., tired from their trip went off to bed and Elise sneaked away to be with her boyfriend. Just as Rachael was about to drop off to sleep she heard sounds on the stairs. She thought it was Elise returning but she became afraid when a strange dark figure appeared in her bedroom door. The intruder blasted both her and her husband to death with a shotgun loaded with buckshot. Elise had the misfortune to return later that evening and find her parent’s brutally slain bodies.
Sharon Potts thrusts us into her story suddenly and excitedly. Jeremy had to return from his wanderings and Sharon shows us a young man who does not want to take on the responsibility of looking after his 13 year old sister. Jeremy does, however, decide to stick around and try to find out who murdered their parents. He bumbles around in his amateur way getting a job at the big accounting firm where his mother was one of the three partners. He also enrolls in some business courses in the college where his father was a tenured professor.
His mother’s business partners welcome Jeremy and let him have a pretty free hand as a junior auditor. Jeremy searches in the archives of old paper records he is assigned to organizing and finds some papers of an audit his mother had done 18 years previously that seemed a little suspicious. He also made friends with his father’s graduate assistant and got her to help try to find out who might have wanted to get rid of his father. But his searching led to many dead ends and it is obvious that Jeremy is not getting anywhere.
Elise had blacked out on much of what happened when she found her parents but she gradually begins to remember things. She saw a shadow man in black with no face and big bug eyes. The man said to her “Your mama is calling you.” These clues begin to put Jeremy on the right track and things heat up as there are a couple of attempts on Jeremy’s life and his new friend at the CPA firm who is helping him.
Jeremy finally puts some of the pieces together and narrows down his suspects to one of four different people. He follows them off the an island in the Caribbean where there is a violent confrontation then follows one back to Miami for the final scenes. I don’t want to spoil the end for you so I will leave it vague. Suffice to say it is exciting and you will be very entertained if you read this book. It is a fine story and gets an 8 of 10 on the Weaver meter.
