While her usual heroine, Lt. Taylor Jackson, is ostensibly on vacation — she could use one, after surviving a bullet in the head and phantom terrors in last year’s
Where the Dead All Lie — Nashville mystery novelist
J.T. Ellison turns her attention to another crime-fighting pro with troubles to spare: medical examiner Dr. Samantha Owens. In Ellison’s latest novel,
A Deeper Darkness, Owens copes with the tragic wake of the floods that ravaged Tennessee by plunging into the mysterious death of an ex-boyfriend — a killing that isn’t the random carjacking it was made to appear.
The ensuing thriller draws a bloody path from Afghanistan to Washington, D.C., while award-winning author Ellison uses her background as a White House and Department of Commerce staffer and her forensic research to snare her protagonist in a web of intrigue. Ellison will read from and sign her latest book 2 to 4 p.m. Saturday, May 12, at the cool Lenox Village mystery bookstore Mysteries & More, 6965 Sunnywood Drive. (And stop afterward at a CL favorite, Bruster's Real Ice Cream.)