Buckley, Julia: The Dark Backward

Midnight Ink © 2006, 240 pages [amazon]

Thirty-year-old Lily Caldwell is short and pretty and tough, unforgiving and angry, the last of these with good reason. About a year before author Julia Buckley's narrative begins, Lily's partner had been killed on a routine traffic stop, and Lily herself had been shot and almost killed. This would have been bad enough, but worse was the fact that no one believed Lily when she came to, after seven and a half minutes of being technically dead, announcing that she'd seen the shooter's face in a vision: as if handsome Governor Nob Stevens had nothing better to do than gun down police officers on a rain-slick street in the middle of the night. Lily's persistent belief that Stevens was the shooter cost her her job and, ultimately, her husband, whom she left because of his failure to believe her. But despite this lack of support Lily has continued trying to find a connection between Stevens and the cold case she and her partner had been investigating before the shooting, the murder some seventeen years earlier of a young schoolteacher, Emily Martin. Buckley follows Lily and her growing circle of supporters as evidence of a connection between Emily and Stevens starts to pile up. But trapping the powerful Governor will not be an easy task: he's a formidable man who's not accustomed to losing.

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