Kristen Lepionka books in order

Nobody knows what happened to Sarah Cook. The beautiful blonde teenager disappeared fifteen years ago, the same night her parents were brutally murdered in their suburban Ohio home. Her boyfriend Brad Stockton―black and from the wrong side of the tracks―was convicted of the murders and is now on death row. 

Though he’s maintained his innocence all along, the clock is running out. His execution is only weeks away when his devoted sister insists she spied Sarah at an area gas station. Willing to try anything, she hires PI Roxane Weary to look at the case and see if she can locate Sarah.

Brad might be in a bad way, but private investigator Roxane Weary isn’t doing so hot herself. Still reeling from the recent death of her cop father in the line of duty, her main way of dealing with her grief has been working as little and drinking as much as possible. But Roxane finds herself drawn in to the story of Sarah's vanishing act, especially when she links the disappearance to one of her father’s unsolved murder cases involving another teen girl.

The stakes get higher as Roxane discovers that the two girls may not be the only beautiful blonde teenagers who’ve turned up missing or dead. As her investigation gets darker and darker, Roxane will have to risk everything to find the truth. Lives depend on her cracking this case―hers included.

Marin Strasser has a secret. Her fiancé thinks her secret is that she’s having an affair, and he hires P.I. Roxane Weary to prove it. Then, just days into the case, Marin is shot to death on a side street in an apparent mugging. 

But soon enough the police begin to focus on Roxane's client for Marin’s death; so she starts to dig deeper into Marin’s life―discovering that the elegant woman she’s been following has a past and a half, including two previous marriages, an adult son fresh out of prison, and a criminal record of her own.

The trail leads to a crew of con artists, an ugly real estate scam that defrauds unsuspecting elderly homeowners out of their property, and the suspicious accident of a wealthy older woman who lives just down the street from where Marin was killed.

With Roxane’s client facing a murder indictment, the scammers hit close to home to force Roxane to drop the case, and it becomes clear that the stakes are as high as the secrets run deep.

A 3am phone call is never good news.

Private investigator Roxane Weary receives a panicked call from her brother, Andrew: his one-time fling, Addison, who turned up at his apartment the night before drunk, bloodied and hysterical, has gone missing. As police suspicion quickly falls on her brother, Roxane knows she is the only person who believes him, she just has to figure out what happened.

Through tracking Addison's digital footprint she goes deeper and deeper into the events preceding her disappearance. But, as Roxane struggles to distinguish the truth from the stories people tell about themselves online, the case takes another dramatic turn.

Junior high school nurse Rebecca Newsome was an experienced hiker―until she plummeted to her death at the bottom of a ravine in a Columbus metro park. Her daughter, Maggie, doesn't believe it was an accident, and Rebecca's ex-husband is her prime suspect. But he's a well-connected ex-cop and Maggie is certain that's the reason no one will listen to her. Roxane quickly uncovers that the dead woman's ex is definitely a jerk, but is he a murderer?

As she pieces together the days before Rebecca died, what Roxane finds doesn't quite add up. From a series of trips to Detroit and across the border to a casino in Windsor, Canada, to strange calls from Rebecca's home to a charismatic political candidate, to a women's health organization, to a secretive church group that seems to have more information about its members than it should, Roxane needs to figure out how everything is connected before a dangerous secret gets someone else killed.