Searchers (Thorndike)
3 primary works
Book 1
At the reading of her father's will, Maria Slade receives shocking news--as a four-year-old, she'd witnessed her prostitute mother's murder and been taken into hiding by the well-meaning preacher who'd raised her as his own.
Maria remembers none of that. But now she's determined to flush her mother's killer out of hiding and discover the identity of her birth father. She heads to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she meets Detective Bodie Scott.
Empathizing with this beautiful woman looking to find out who she really is, he opens the decades-old case file. Their investigation leads them down a dangerous path, where no one is what they seem. Where a father does not want to be found. And a murderer has "like mother, like daughter" in mind for Maria.
Book 2
Book 3
Her "father's" deathbed confession reveals that Holly's real father was almost certainly the notorious serial killer known as "The Hunter," and that her mother gave Holly up to save her life. But The Hunter was never caught--and Holly's mother simply vanished.
In search of her past, Holly leaves both her home and Bud Tate, the handsome ranch foreman she's afraid to love, horrified by the knowledge that the blood of a depraved killer might run through her veins. Haunted, driven, she searches for The Hunter and hopes her mother was wrong.
But her search leads to a terrible truth no one could have imagined, and even Bud's determination to follow and protect the woman he loves may not be enough to save Holly from the terrors of a past become present.