Barbara Holloway, attorney, becomes obsessed with an incident that took place while on vacation. She helped a young woman who had been hurt and was lying outside her cabin, in a remote area. Later she learned that this woman and her young son had disappeared.

She learns that the woman, Elizabeth Kurtz, is the ex-wife of the future heir to a large estate. Barbara learns that there may be a reason to keep Elizabeth quiet - or missing, and she takes it upon herself to determine just where she has gone and why.

Finally she gets a phone call. Elizabeth Kurtz. While the press assumed that Holloway and Kurtz were friends, they had only met at that one time, when Holloway helped Kurtz, thereby saving her life. Now, of course, Barbara has to find out more and agrees to meet Kurtz at an apartment in town in an hour. But when she shows up she is met by a dead woman.

Some things are not adding up. Holloway and her father pull strings wherever they can to find information that might lead them to the killer. There is a conflict-of-interest issue with Barbara having discovered the body but they find ways around it. The action speeds up until the final unveiling of the truth.

Not bad but not earthshaking. Good enough for the airplane. ( )

I am a big fan of Kate Wilhelm, especially the Barbara Holloway series. I feel I "know" the key people in these books quite well. Thhe plot seemed a bit stretched but nonetheless the story was a good one. As always, I enjoyed listening to it. ( )

Attorney Barbara Holloway needs to think; or to avoid thinking; or maybe she just needs to get away. In any case, she has been drifting from motel to motel for weeks when she rents a remote cabin as her next stop. Of course trouble manages to find her, just as it always has. She comes upon a frightened little boy who leads her to his semi-conscious mother, who lies beaten in the rain. Left to die, and in this wilderness the little boy would have died, too, had he not found help. When help arrives they are gone - but to where and why? I enjoyed reading this book, its a new author for me, I certainly will save this author's name for future reads. ( )

This really captured my imagination right away. It was hard to stop listening when I got to my destination. Sure did get the kitchen clean too. Some parts seemed a little far fetched, but I was so caught up in it that I didn't mind. ( )

I have always enjoyed the Barbara Holloway series and one night, unable to sleep, I picked this on one of my listening devices, and started listening. The initial premise hooks you right away. Elizabeth Kurtz flees her nere-do-well ex-husband after she discover a file of documents that, we learn later but suspect from the beginning, has information that will damage her ex-husband’s father’s corporation. The father is on death’s door and her ex- is desperately trying to find a document that would assign him part of the corporation before his father dies and his mother can retrieve it. Or so we are lead to believe. Elizabeth’s ex-mother-in-law hates Elizabeth and her grandson Jason.

Elizabeth flees with her son attempting to hide (why she hides in the father-in-law’s cabin in the woods seemed ill-advised or at the very least dumb.) Barbara, hiding from her own demons and a proposal from her boyfriend (another strange reaction,) is found by a frantic Jason on a deserted beach seeking help for his mother who has suffered what appears to be a beating. Elizabeth makes the woman as comfortable as possible, but when she and her cabin’s caretaker arrive back on the scene, both the boy and his mother are gone. Barbara returns home to discover she is suspected of complicity in the suspected kidnapping of Jason and killing of his mother. The plot thickens as Elizabeth and Barbara try to avoid the law and the killers and still maintain some important secrets. The denouement was reminiscent of the classic Rex Stout and Agatha Christie where the detective/lawyer gets the principles in a room and forces out the truth.

Personally, I would have preferred more courtroom antics and less personal soul-searching by Barbara over Darren, her on-again-off-again boyfriend. Some of the antagonism with the police seemed forced and my eyes kept rolling back into my head as I remarked to myself, “come on, people, if you sat down and everyone explained what they knew,. . . Then again, I suppose there would have been no story. Still, an enjoyable audiobook. ( )