Back to Lazarus

She’s investigating a suspicious prison suicide. Someone’s determined to hide the truth…

North Florida, 2004. Private Investigator Sydney Brennan cut ties with her nearest and dearest long ago and keeps her past close to her vest. But it’s hard not to reflect on her own estranged family when a woman hires her to look into her father’s prison-cell suicide. Since the dead man served over twenty years for murdering his wife, Sydney suspects it wasn’t guilt that killed him. What other sins does her client’s family hide?

Sydney’s client isn’t the only one concealing secrets. As Sydney uncovers shady evidence and incomplete reports, the determined PI makes enemies of those who want their misdeeds to stay buried. And though she barely survives a brutal attack, she refuses to allow a violent murderer to remain free.

Can Sydney cut through the lies and expose the coverup before she meets a deadly fate?

Back to Lazarus is the first book in the Sydney Brennan Mysteries series. If you like strong heroines and gut-wrenching twists and turns, with occasional snarky profanity, then you’ll love Judy K. Walker’s gripping novel.

Buy Back to Lazarus to solve a long-forgotten mystery today!

The Sydney Brennan PI Mysteries alternate between novels and novellas. The books stand alone, but each of Sydney’s adventures builds upon previous ones. The reading order is:

1) Back to Lazarus
2) Secrets in Stockbridge
3) The Perils of Panacea
4) No Safe Winterport
5) Braving the Boneyard
6) River Bound
7) Grave Truth
8) Memory Lane

From the Back Cover:

*When I was six years old, my father killed my mother. He beat and choked her to death. I'm told that he was found hanging from a homemade noose in his cell. I want to know why he waited so long to do it.*

Sydney Brennan isn't sure how to answer her client's question, short of holding a séance, and the Tallahassee detective has some questions of her own. Why does Noel Thomas remember so little about her childhood? Why is she delving into her father's suicide now? And, most importantly, why is Noel lying to her?

Crisscrossing the Florida Panhandle to reconstruct the tragic Thomas family history, Sydney stumbles across a link between the decades-old violence and a present-day web of deceit and corruption. To understand the connection, Sydney must go Back to Lazarus, back to the town where Noel's beautiful but troubled mother began her inevitable descent over twenty years ago. But by following in the footsteps of the murdered woman, does Sydney risk sharing her fate?

Rooted in bars and back roads and Panhandle prisons, forgotten towns and forgotten people, at its heart Back to Lazarus is about stories: the stories people tell us, the stories we tell ourselves, and what happens when we realize it's all a lie.