Ordinary Justice — Trudy Labovitz

The last time she had been up against a man who had been determined to kill, Paul Martin had murdered her best friend. Like a tornado that levels a town, that act had taken Zoe's ambition, her carefully nurtured dreams, and the friend who was as much family as any of her brothers and sisters, and blown them all away, scattering the wreckage to the elements like so much flotsam.

Zoe Kergulin is a woman on the run from her past. Having witnessed her closest friend's murder at the hands of an abusive husband, Zoe has fled Washington, D.C., for the serenity and solitude of the West Virginia mountains. Here, in a small town whose sole claim is that the local ordinary -- or inn -- was a stop on the legendary Underground Railroad, Zoe hopes to rebuild her life. But the past threatens to catch up with her when Zoe's neighbor, Susan Rourke, disappears and is presumed murdered by her estranged husband. As Zoe investigates a stormy relationship that ended in the brutal murder of one spouse and the mysterious disappearance of the other, she discovers a close-knit community of rural folk whose members hide secrets of their own -- from the illicit production of moonshine to hunting out of season to domestic violence. Travel along the twists and turns of these mountain trails where the most dangerous animals lurking in the shadows are the two-legged kind.