Smoke Screen (Sydney Teaque Mysteries)

Plot

Where there's smoke. . . Sydney Teague makes her living by using her head, not her heart. But when it came to Seth Bolick, she couldn't help herself. He was a man obsessed, plunging his life and soul into one remarkable invention: a safe synthetic-nicotine substitute. When she agreed to take him on as a client of her small Charlotte, North Carolina, ad agency, Sydney could not imagine the work she would end up doing for Seth: It's her job to find his killer. The police call it a suicide, and so does Seth's family. Sydney knows they're wrong. When she starts investigating Seth's last days and the forces that were gathering against him, she exposes a pattern of lies and murderous violence amid the tobacco-rich fields of North Carolina. Now Sydney Teague is not just another hard-driving businesswoman who doesn't know when to quit: She's the next, best candidate for murder. . . .