Author Description

<p>Runaway. Victim of domestic battery. An older, married boyfriend. Pregnant. And ultimately, dead and forgotten in a cornfield.<br> <br> For Sheriff's Deputy Wes Spahn, this isn't just another case. For Spahn, this case will have too many emotional similarities to his first case as a detective, similarities that will leave him questioning everything.<br> <br> When a farmer finds a pile of bones, Spahn begins an odyssey that will lead him inexorably both forward through false leads and empty clues, from incorrect identifications to bad suspects and backward into a case that is a decade old. It also leads to tension between Spahn and his fellow officers as he pushes them out of his way in his zeal to solve the case.<br> <br> Spahn's victim is Suzanne Margaret Haas, a runaway since early summer. As he puts her life together, Spahn comes to focus on her boyfriend. He is a man nearly ten years older, dishonorably discharged from the military, married but with girlfriends scattered throughout the area. Spahn is convinced of the man's guilt.<br> <br> But there is another man...who has a taste for violence and young girls. Is he Suzanne's killer?<br> <br> During all this, ratcheting up his emotional barrenness, is his on-going failure in solving his very first case, that of a missing girl. He tries to work both cases simultaneously and soon understands someone is gunning for him. He finds tire tracks and footprints in the snow around his house and sees multiple vehicles following him.<br> <br> When he realizes the different vehicles belong to different people, who are following him for different reasons, Spahn begins to believe his world is falling in on him, and he wonders if he's been on the wrong road the entire time, both in how he handled the two cases and how he handled everyone around him.<br> <br> The endgame comes quickly and at the story's end, Spahn walks away from the job and the friends he's lost, his original case still unsolved.<br> <br> Praise for THE UNKN