A chance meeting with Jewell Scoggins, the former Cherokee Rose of the Texas Tumbleweeds, a very popular country group in the fifties, makes Claire think she can put a face with the skeleton. Before she is able to add a name, Jewell is found dead, and the photograph that may have held the answers missing. Claire turns to county colleague and growing love interest, the married Ramon Covarrabias for his law enforcement connections. Ramon introduces her to his cousin Yolanda, who lives a paranoid, hermit-like existence, but who is an excellent Internet researcher who has compiled quite a dossier on local cotton gin legend, CC Tidwell, who also has longtime ties to the area and river.

The more questions Claire asks, even those seemingly innocent just to ascertain the identity of the skeleton, the closer she gets to a decades old secret that someone who may have killed once to keep hidden, will not hesitate to kill again.

Taffy Cannon has taken the difficult task of seamlessly finishing another author's work and has done so effortlessly. Readers of the three previous Claire Sharple mysteries will have a hard time detecting any change. Claire's quiet curiosity and unwillingness to let things alone serves her well in both her job and her personal life. She does not allow feelings of loss and loneliness to overwhelm her so much as to start a relationship with Ramon - a relationship that both parties are holding back from.

While the characters involved in the mystery are entertaining and show quirkier sides of human life, none is particularly well-developed and readers may be hard pressed to see what draws Claire to Jewell so quickly. The mystery is carefully and methodically plotted, though the answers to the fifty-year-old mystery man may not entirely satisfy some readers. Readers who favor rural western mysteries will appreciate the barren starkness of the setting.

--Jennifer Monahan Winberry