Just Jennifer

Bone Dust White by Karin Salvalaggio (Minotaur, Mary 2014) 

One night just before her eighteenth birthday, Grace thinks she hears someone calling her name and looks out the back window of her house just as a woman is stabbed in the backyard.  Grace goes to the woman and realizes it is the mother Leanne who left her when she was a young child.  Detective Macy Greeley has been searching for Leanne for the past eleven years and wants to know what brought her back to Montana after all these years.   But Grace and Macy aren’t the only ones searching for answers to secrets Leanne held; more attacks on those closest to Grace, including a possible attempt on Grace while she is in the hospital, ratchet up the urgency to the investigation…as does the fact that Macy is seven months pregnant, unsure about how to deal with the father of her child and facing her boyfriend from what seems like another life.  As Grace and Macy each search for answers to their questions, a horrifying picture is brought in to focus.  The solution isn't entirely unexpected, but the setting and the characters are real.