One of the hundred books a year I read:

Police respond to a shots fired call and knock on a front door. They hear a succession of shots, barge in, and arrest pregnant Evie Carter as she stands over her murdered husband with the smoking murder weapon.

Detective D.D. Warren met 16 years earlier when then teen-aged Evie confessed to accidentally murdering her father with a shotgun. With such a history and a literal smoking gun, the case appears open and shut.

But problems develop quickly. The shots reported by the neighbors occurred a full eight minutes before police arrived. Evie claims she came home and found her husband already murdered. Her shots were aimed at destroying the pistol laptop on his desk, though she won’t explain why.

To complicate matters further, the victim is recognized by one of Warren’s informants. The young lady had been kidnapped and held for over a year, subjected to horrific abuse. She claims the victim met her kidnapper and almost took her for his own before being thwarted. Her kidnapper can’t explain how they knew each other since he was killed in the FBI raid that freed the young woman.

All of this occurs in the first fifty pages (or less) in Gardner’s fast-paced, twisted, and dark story. In other words, this is classic Gardner.