The Cold Case Novel That Kept Me Up Past Midnight

The clock on the mantel said 12:22 and I was still in the green chair with a paperback open on my knee. I am sixty-six years old, retired after thirty-one years running a church school library, and I do not stay up past midnight for a book. I fixed two plates for supper, washed them, sat down at seven to read a chapter, and looked up five hours later with my tea gone cold. The book was Traces of Guilt by Dee Henderson. One Saturday in February 2025. In the four years since I retired it is the only novel that has cost me a night's sleep.

I bought it the way I buy most things now, a paperback from Amazon, on the strength of one line in the description: a new task force reexamining unsolved crimes in Illinois, and a State Police detective named Evie Blackwell going back through old evidence in missing-persons cases in Carin County. That is close to all the listing tells you, and I want to be honest about that up front. There is no breathless summary on the back. Henderson does not hand you a hook and a countdown. She hands you a detective and a county full of people who have been waiting a long time to be asked a second question.

What you get is a Bethany House paperback, 389 pages, published in 2016, and it reads like the case file it is about. Old interviews. Old statements that do not line up. A woman with a notebook going back to the beginning because the beginning was done badly the first time. I have read a great many mystery novels in my working life, and most of them keep you turning pages by keeping something from you. This one keeps you turning pages because you want to see the work done properly.

It is slow. I will say that plainly rather than dress it up. Henderson is in no hurry and does not pretend otherwise. Glenn went to bed at nine the way he always does, and I told myself one more chapter three separate times. There is no chase in it worth mentioning and no clock running down. What there is, is paper. Records. A person across a table being careful about what she says. I found that restful, and I recognize that not every reader will.

There is no chase in it worth mentioning. What there is, is a woman with a notebook, and I read two hundred pages of that without once looking up.

If you want the chase, I will point you elsewhere and gladly. Terri Blackstock's If I Run is the fastest book I have read in years, and I finished it in two nights, which for me is unheard of. When a reader tells me she wants suspense that moves, that is the one I put in her hands. When she tells me she wants a mystery to settle into with a pencil and an evening, I give her this. The two are not in competition. They are for different moods and different weeks.

I should say something about the faith side, because that is what most of us are really asking when we ask. Nothing in it preached at me. The people in this book pray the way people pray when they are tired and out of answers, briefly, without ceremony, and then they go back to work. If you are looking for a devotional wrapped in a plot, this is not it. If you are looking for a clean mystery with people who take their faith seriously without making a speech about it, this fits.

My book group never read this one. I read it alone in February 2025 and it has sat on the hall bookcase ever since, one copy, no loaned-out gaps in the row. I have thought about putting it on the list for the second Tuesday and I have not, for a plain reason: it is a two-book story, and I do not like handing eight women half of something without warning them first. Dottie, who is seventy-four and has guessed the culprit in every book we have read together in eleven years, would have a fine time with this one. I will leave it at that and say no more.

The copy on my shelf is the Bethany House paperback, 389 pages, 5.43 by 8.27 inches, and it lay open on my knee without my having to hold it down. That sounds like a small thing. But I read in a chair, not at a desk, and a book that fights me gets set aside by nine o'clock.

Now the part that decides it for you. If you need a body in the first chapter, this will frustrate you badly, and I would rather tell you now than have you grumble at me later. If you want a romance at the center of the whole thing, look elsewhere. There is a thread of one here and I will not tell you where it goes. And if you want everything tied off in a single volume, know before you begin that this is book one of two, because the listing says so and I would rather you hear it from a person.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you to buy it for a week when you are not in a hurry. I would tell you to start it on a Friday if you have a Saturday to spare, because I did not, and I paid for it the next morning. I would tell you that the second one is called Threads of Suspicion and that I have read it too, in order, the way I read everything, so plan on wanting it before you are done.

And I would tell you the plain truth about it. It is not a book that fixes anything or answers anything. It is several good evenings with a detective who does her job, written by a woman who clearly respects the job. Henderson has done this long enough that she trusts a reader to sit still, and I did sit still, longer than I meant to. More than three thousand readers have put it at 4.6 out of five, which tells you a good many people felt the way I did. I wrote it in my notebook the morning after, in the column for who I would hand it to, and I wrote: a patient reader. That is the whole of it.