Quarry — Susan Cummins Miller

With crimes of passion striking the quiet University of Del Rio campus, geologist Frankie MacFarlane is enmeshed in the case of a fragile psyche pushed to the edge...

Just as Frankie arranges her doctoral dissertation's long-awaited defense, a police investigation has reopened -- alongside unhealed wounds. When her ex-fiancé Geoff Travers vanished, expelled by the university for plagiarizing Frankie's research, she should've deduced that his remains -- found later in the desert -- couldn't be legit, either.

Now an unknown assailant is preying on high-profile geologists. Two members of her dissertation defense board have been attacked, one of them fatally. A fellow student has been abducted from her fieldwork site and, trapped amid the volcanic mesas of the Cady Mountains, has little time left. As Frankie sorts clues, she'll need to keep perspective -- or she'll swiftly become a psychopath's latest quarry.