Dwellings

In Dwellings, Ken Linn's debut novel in the Pete Barrow Mystery Series, math teacher and part-time private investigator Pete Barrow takes on a case more complex and dangerous than anything he's ever encountered before in rural Potomac County, deep in the heart of Virginia's Northern Neck Peninsula. 

When young wife Melissa Adamson goes missing, her close friend Kasey Dylan wants to be certain that she's safe from her abusive husband. But the city investigator she's hired is dealing with a crisis of his own and calls on Pete Barrow to take over the search for Melissa, last reported to be hiding out in Potomac County with a woman named Tammy. 

With the support of his girlfriend, school psychologist Wendi Wynston, and the sometimes-reluctant help of the county's long-time African American sheriff, Oscar Murphy, Barrow takes on the seemingly straightforward case, which quickly evolves into a full-blown investigation that leads from a sketchy woman's crisis center to a selective program at a secretive estate. When people related to the investigation turn up dead, things veer off into dangerous territory populated with an ambitious group of lawyers, a six-year-old boy of questionable origin, a threatening thug-for-hire, and a wealthy man with a dark and twisted secret.