The car had been underwater for twenty-eight years. The man belted into the driver's seat wasn't the man who owned it. At dawn on a drainage canal off Krome Avenue, a volunteer dive team pulls a gray 1990s sedan out of the black water west of Miami. The skeleton inside is still buckled in, as if waiting at a red light. The car belongs to charter captain Glenn Kessler, who vanished in 1998 and was written off as a runaway by one of the most respected homicide detectives in Miami history. Then the medical examiner lays out the bones, and the case breaks open. The man in the car is too young. He has a surgical plate in his leg that Glenn never had. And the back of his skull carries a small curved fracture that no canal, no rock, and no accident could have made. Detective Sergeant Wade Rourke now has two cases. Who is the young man in the car? And where did Glenn Kessler go? The answers lead from the cold examination rooms of the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner's office to the night-running charter boats of Biscayne Bay, from a glass campaign tower on Brickell Avenue to a stilt house at the end of the Overseas Highway. Along the way, a witness is shot in his own recliner, a candidate for county commission starts to sweat, and a missing man who has been hiding for twenty-eight years sends a warning: look at your own people. Because someone in 1998 made very sure nobody would ever look in that canal. And that someone is still watching. Inside The Miami Skeleton: A cold case that opens with a car rising out of an Everglades canal and never lets go Forensic detail written by a board-certified physician, from bone-age estimates to a surgical implant traced by its lot number Real South Florida settings: Krome Avenue, Little Havana, Black Point Marina, Calle Ocho, the Seven Mile Bridge region of the Florida Keys A dry-witted medical examiner, a wisecracking young detective, and a sergeant forced to choose between loyalty and the truth Fair-play clues hidden in plain sight and a final twist you can solve if you watch closely Tense and violent in places, with no graphic gore or explicit content A complete standalone thriller with a full ending and no cliffhanger For readers of Michael Connelly, Karin Slaughter, David Baldacci, and Lisa Gardner, and for anyone who likes a crime novel where the smallest detail on the first page turns out to matter most. Some cases don't stay buried. Some just wait for someone to come and look.
