Nine Minutes Before

Emily Larson has driven the road her husband died on every January for eight years. Jacob crashed at mile marker nine on the way to his son's birth, and the only thing that never sat right with her was the fourteen-second call from a burner phone nine minutes before his car went into the switchback. The troopers shrugged. Emily stopped asking. She did not stop wondering.

Then a black SUV hits a moose on the same road in the same snow, and the man who climbs out of the wreck is standing too still for the situation. Nathan knows the mile markers. He knows her name before she gives it. Within a mile of her giving him a ride, he has read her the way she reads a design brief, and inside the gate of the compound he has built in the Gallatin foothills, her license plate is already running.

What Nathan knows and what Emily is about to learn is that her father did not die of a heart attack eighteen years ago, her husband did not die by accident eight years ago, and the network that killed both of them is still operating. Emily's design brain was built for logos. It turns out to be built for maps too.

A Montana-set romantic suspense about a widow, a dangerous man, an eight-year-old with a sketchbook, and the thread that finally pulls.