Murder of the 33rd

Charleston keeps its secrets the way it keeps its dead: beautifully, and in good company. When decorated Marine and real-estate magnate Gray Maitland is found dead in his half-restored Battery mansion, the city calls it a tragedy and the coroner calls it his heart. Maitland had been raised to the thirty-third degree, the highest honor Freemasonry can bestow. A man like that is mourned, not investigated. Derek Campbell knows better. A scarred ex-cop turned reluctant private investigator, Derek was the one man Gray ever stood up for, and he can read the sign left on his friend's body, one only a brother of the Craft would recognize. Gray Maitland did not have the kind of heart that quits. He was executed, in due and ancient form and dressed up as nature, by men so certain no one would read the dressing that they signed it. The dead man's daughter is the piece nobody sees. Magnolia "Nola" Maitland is everything Charleston raised her to be, gracious, lovely, and fatally underestimated, not least by the men hunting her. Hidden among her father's effects is a book that sat inside the family's walls for a hundred years, one the most powerful men in the city will kill to keep buried, and Nola is the only soul alive who can reach it. She doesn't yet know she's carrying it. To keep a promise to a dead friend, Derek must break the one vow that has kept him standing, walk back into the brotherhood that made him, and follow a trail of clean money and quiet murders down to the rot beneath the city's proudest secret, a foundation that runs through his own blood. As the machine closes in, a good detective builds a flawless case against the wrong woman, a frightened young Mason is caught between fear and conscience, and Derek and Nola learn that the men they are chasing answer to colder men still. Set in the fog and gaslight of the Lowcountry, Murder of the 33rd is a Southern-gothic mystery of ritual, inheritance, and the cost of being told not to look.