Undertow

A county auditor does not drown in a construction caisson by accident. Detective Sergeant Cora Bishop knows it the moment she reads the scene: the dry ladder rungs, the double-knotted boots, the hard hat clipped to a belt and never worn. Ray Okada went into the water alive and stunned, and everything about the way he was found is a story someone wrote afterward.The story has a signature on it. Harborline, the private security firm that has run the port's overnight gate for four years, reported the body, kept the logs, and cannot quite explain the six hours it took to delete the report Okada sent the night he died. Behind Harborline stands Meridian Coastal, a company with City Hall on speed dial and a district attorney who would rather this be a workplace accident than a homicide. Witnesses recant. A guard vanishes with a raise and a smile. The wall goes up fast, and it is built to hold.But Okada was an auditor to the bone, and auditors keep copies. Working the one thread the machine cannot buy, the dead man's own concealed ledger, Bishop and Detective Theo Ruiz push a fair-play case up from the flats toward the hill, one document at a time, toward the single fact the cover-up was built to bury, and the older death it connects to.Undertow is the second book in The Port Salish Cases: an atmospheric, morally serious police procedural of ghost cargo and institutional rot in a drowned Pacific Northwest port, a detective who reads what is missing from a room, and a corruption that reaches higher than any one arrest can touch. The record shows who did it. The question is who ordered it.