Cold Altar

A small-town cold case gets new life when a woman hands a 22-year-old private investigator his first assignment. Going with the notes his father used when he first investigated the case, Alex Bourque delves into the 31-year-old mystery: an 11-year-old boy, kidnapped without witnesses, abused and murdered. There is little evidence to go on except a white L on the boy's chest as well as a black smudge on his forehead, but with the help of his girlfriend Lauryn, Alex makes do with what he has and tries to solve the case from scratch. Yet there are people who don't want him to find out what happened, and they'll go to any lengths to stop Alex from discovering the truth. A classic whodunit in the vein of the late Robert B. Parker, COLD ALTAR is the first book in the Small Town PI series.