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A tense psychological thriller introducing a strong female protagonist.

Kate Selby visits the coastal Florida office of Shannon Wells Investigations and demands to know why her mother, Faith, had hired a private eye a year earlier. It turns out that Faith had wanted Shannon to find out her true identity, which Shannon had been unable to do. Now Kate says her mother has been murdered. What follows is a dark, moody mystery revolving around a 25-year-old photograph taken by Faith that appeared in a coffee table book named Millennium Memories, depicting images of ordinary people doing ordinary things. In the photo, a young girl is standing in front of a motel vending machine and holding a red can of Coke, her back to the camera. But there had been a murder in the motel parking lot that night in Michigan so long ago. Now the killer wants to eliminate witnesses and seems to have tracked down Faith. Who was the girl in the photograph, and what happened to her? And is Faith’s death connected to the recent triple murder of a prosecutor and his family? Shannon has horrible nightmares about a man coming to kill her, and she has a scar on her face from an event in her own past. A strange woman named Maro in Cocoa Beach tells Shannon that a man killed her in past lives and is about to do it again unless she can kill him first, and she’s unsure whether to believe the woman’s story. Is Maro addled by the lightning strike she survived as a child, or did it give her special powers? There are moody scenes involving darkness, wind-driven rain, and lonely roads that bring to mind the opening chapters of a Stephen King novel. And those roads twist a lot as Freeman unloads one surprise after another. He has written several excellent adventures including Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Evolution (2020).

An enjoyable read. May there be more Shannon Wells tales to come.