The Independently Published The Line Between Paperback

A body in a creek bed. Two cops. One disputed property line. Zero cooperation.

When Constable Ellie Renner finds a dead man face-down in the shallows of Blackjack Creek, her first call should be simple: report it, hand it off, go back to noise complaints and drainage disputes. But the body is lying eight feet past a survey marker set in 1952, and nobody can agree whether those eight feet belong to the county or the township. Until somebody does, nobody is in charge.

Enter Sheriff Cole Braddock, who has problems of his own: three stolen backhoes, a deputy on somebody else's payroll, and a commissioner who'd rather bury a scandal than fund the fix. He doesn't need a territorial constable with a coal-cellar office and a secondhand vest. She doesn't need a county sheriff who thinks jurisdiction is a synonym for ownership. They need each other. They just don't know it yet.

What starts as a turf war becomes something far more dangerous.

A murdered contractor who saw what he was digging and kept digging. An engineer whose car went into a ditch on Route 16 with a blood alcohol level and twelve years of sobriety behind him. A tunnel running under sixty years of bureaucratic neglect. And a county infrastructure director quietly exploiting the gap between two jurisdictions to run a narcotics pipeline from Baltimore to the Ohio line.

Renner and Braddock follow the evidence through old survey maps, church basements, a paranoid hoarder's archive, and two miles of tunnel dug with stolen county equipment. To finish it they'll have to outmaneuver a courthouse that answers to the man they're chasing, go underground without backup, and work out whether the thing building between them is professional respect or something considerably harder to file.

The Line Between is a procedural thriller about the spaces nobody watches, and the people stubborn enough to stand in them.

For readers of Craig Johnson's Walt Longmire series, William Kent Krueger's Cork O'Connor novels, and Julia Keller's Bell Elkins mysteries.