Bones Under the Ice (1) (A Jhonni Laurent Mystery)

Field’s Crossing in Northern Indiana is farm country, and in the winter, with the snow drifting across the open flat lands, a body lies hidden under a 15-foot pile of ice and snow. But not for long.

Two boys racing down a hill trip and fall, and discover an arm sticking out of the snow. When the public works director shows up to help Sheriff Jhonni Laurent free the body of the young girl who is frozen solid into the ice, he immediately recognizes her as Stephanie Gattison, his brother’s girlfriend. And she was pregnant.

This is the first murder that Laurent, who won a bitter election four years ago, has had to deal with. Murders don’t happen often in Field’s Crossing.

A police procedural, Bones Under the Ice is Mary Ann Miller’s debut novel and the first book in the Jhonni Laurent Mystery Series.

The unsolved murder is enough to gear up Laurent’s opponent for another bloody political battle in the upcoming election, and he is willing to do whatever to smear her name.

But besides the present, Laurent finds herself having to grapple with the distant past.

Thirty years ago, Laurent and David Lucroy, both students at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, had lived together. It was a situation that fell apart when Laurent revealed she was pregnant. Angry at her, he had managed to get her dismissed from the school’s orchestra. She had put her daughter up for adoption, a pain she had never gotten over. She also had never gotten past her anger at her former boyfriend. Despite believing she was being petty, Laurent continues to hate him and still wishes him ill.

Now, her daughter wants to meet her.

“Laurent passed the post office and Farmers Bank, recrossed Field Street and slowed through the residential area. Why now? Why did this request arrive now? There was no room in her life for this. Forget that she had a murder to solve. Forget about the election next month. Forget about the feud escalating between the Martins and the Tillmans. She wondered if a request to meet had been sent to Lucroy. What would that asshole do?”

And then Laurent discovers another body.

She now needs to keep the town together, herself together, and to solve the crimes.