Throttle and Sin

The Camaro's engine catches on the third crank, a sound like tearing canvas off the tin walls of Cade's Auto Repair. Delia rebuilt that 427 big-block herself. Every gasket, every piston ring, eight hundred hours of her own work. And tonight her brother is going to drive it in one of Tucker Rawlings's races. Jude is twenty-two, three years younger than her, and he owes Tucker for a charter fishing business that never launched and slip fees on a boat he could not afford. If he wins, the debt clears. If he loses, Tucker takes the car. *You lose, he takes you.* Then a man steps out of the shadows between two cypress trees across the street and shows her a badge. Special Agent Garner Holt has been watching the garage for three days. He cannot get near Tucker Rawlings. Delia can. And he is carrying something she has spent years not knowing. *Your father didn't have a stroke, Miss Cade. That was ethylene glycol.* He has the tox report. He has a witness who puts one of Tucker's men at her father's house the night before he collapsed. What he needs is a way into that race. What Delia names, before she agrees to anything, is clean title to the garage, no liens, and Tucker off her land. The next day she is wrist-deep in an engine bay when her hand closes on the wrong rag. *Blood. Still wet. Not hers.* A pair of polished boots stops beside the car. The man in them wears a new Rangers jacket over an old suit, gives the name Garrett Wallace, and asks about a Hugger Orange SS that belonged to Ray Cade and has been gone six years. What follows is a transmitter no bigger than a watch battery clipped inside a collar, a ledger that turns up in her father's toolbox, a woman with red nails and a taser, a storm coming in over the bayou, and a federal agent who is not supposed to care whether she walks back out of the room she just walked into. A dark contemporary romantic suspense in a bayou town of boat slips and swampland and condos going up on Front Street, with a mechanic who has spent her life hauling her brother out of holes, a man who killed her father over money, and an investigation that needs her more than it should. The romance is closed-door.