Boston Attorney Brady Coyne Finds a Young Girl Dying in His Yard

By my count, this is the twenty-fifth Brady Coyne novel, but this is another of those cases where compulsive readers disagree slightly. It opens in the middle of winter, when the Boston attorney opens his back door early one morning to discover a young girl dying in the snow in his yard. Brady brings the girl into the house and calls 911, but it's too late. The girl has had a miscarriage and dies.

The girl, who appears to be about fifteen, has no identification, but the police do find a piece of paper in her pocket with Brady's address. Clearly, she was looking for his house but died before she could get to the door. Brady is heartsick and, when the police prove to be not as interested in the case as he would like, he begins his own investigation in an attempt to determine who the girl was and why she might have been looking for him.

Brady gets a copy of the morgue photo and begins showing it around to anyone who will take a look at it. He also distributes a few copies to street people, thinking that the dead girl might have been on the streets and that someone in that milieu would recognize her. Then, a couple of days later, Brady's Significant Other, Evie, returns from a conference of hospital administrators. She recognizes the girl in the photo as the daughter of a woman who died at the hospital where Evie works. She had counseled the young woman and it now becomes clear that the dead girl was really looking for Evie and not for Brady.

Brady is still determined to find out what happened to the poor girl and then one of the street people who has been showing the girl's picture around for Brady suddenly turns up murdered. A coincidence???

Not hardly, of course, and now Brady feels a double obligation to see this case through to its conclusion. It will be a complicated, surprising and dangerous path to follow, but Brady Coyne is nothing if not determined and will follow his tenuous leads wherever they might take him. The result is another entertaining entry that will appeal particularly to those readers who are steeped in the series.