A Mountain of Evidence

Lewis’s promising first Colorado Skies mystery couples an unusual concept with solid prose and a clever plot. Soon after Michael Leeds, a junior accountant at a Chicago accounting firm, stumbles on a fraud during a review of the company’s inventory, he’s shot to death outside a bar. The woman who will later call herself Kim Jackson, Leeds’s supervisor, knows her boss, Stephen Bender, committed the fraud and ordered Leeds’s killing, but Bender frames Jackson by forging her signature on an incriminating invoice and ensuring her fingerprints appear on the murder weapon. To avoid getting arrested, Jackson adopts a new identity and flees Chicago. She stops in Montrose, Colo., where she settles in and takes a job as a grocery store clerk. Despite her own jeopardy and lingering fears that either Bender or law enforcement will find her, Jackson decides to investigate the murder of her predecessor at the store, 18-year-old Emily Riley, whose naked, strangled corpse was found days after Emily’s disappearance. Lewis maintains plausibility and fast pacing throughout. C.J. Box fans will want to check this out. (Self-published)

Correction: An earlier version of this review listed an incorrect name for the author.