The second in the series of detective murder mystery novels begins in December 1955 with defense attorney Hugh Kerr pondering his fate. Stinging from the loss of a murder trial he believes he should have won, and still emotionally shattered from his own recent brush with the law that saw him and his private secretary, Ellen Thorne, running from the police on an elaborate and grisly homicide charge, he questions the foundations upon which he has based his life. This takes him to a subject rarely broached, even to himself: the fact Christmas always conjures up tragic memories from his past. This particular holiday, the remembrance has come back to haunt him with virulence. Trying unsuccessfully to rid himself of the darkness that envelops his mind, he comes to a grim decision. Making elaborate plans to send Ellen, the woman he loves, away on a holiday trip, and anonymously hiring his best friend, detective Jack Merrick, to work a case in Mexico, Kerr begins a long journey that takes him back to his childhood home where a series of events twenty years ago created a mystery he must now unravel to save his sanity. Book II in this heavily character-driven mystery series follows Ellen and Jack as they trace Hugh’s flight, following him from Los Angeles to Harvard, where he attended law school, and finally to St-Raymond, a small, rural town outside Quebec, Canada. Arriving just in time to prevent a tragedy, the three begin putting together the pieces of a puzzle that began with the murder of Kerr’s father, a rum-runner during Prohibition; the subsequent brutal killing of his mother; and the supposed suicide of his beloved brother. With unanticipated help from Lieutenant Hank Wade, a policeman the attorney had often crossed swords with in Los Angeles, the four discover that Bernard Kerr had been killed by fellow bootleggers seeking to discover the whereabouts of a stolen payout. Failing to discover the hideaway, these same men attempted to get the location from his mother, inadvertently killing her in the process. With some answers finally resolved, there is hope Hugh will finally be able to restore his shattered psyche, but the “Kerr Gang” eventually realize the whole puzzle must be solved before any of them will have peace. by S.L. Kotar and J.E. Gessler