A Whole New Life - Tapa dura

One August evening in a southern Arizona town a sheriff’s deputy comes to Jackson Williams’s door to tell him that his wife has died in a car crash. The deputy questions him while the police search his house and confiscate his computer. His amazement turns to disbelief when they arrest him. Williams suddenly has a whole new life, all right, but not the one he sometimes dreamt of when he admitted to himself that his marriage was a mistake. Now he is a man lost, in prison, awaiting trial for his wife’s murder.
He is not without friends, however. Ruth Norton, his next-door neighbor, convinces a locally famous lawyer to take on his case.
Mara, Jackson’s grown daughter from a previous marriage, happens upon the crisis unknowingly when she arrives in town to seek out the father she never knew as she was growing up.
Finally, there is Tyler, Ruth’s eleven-year-old son. The others aren’t aware of what he can contribute to finding the real killer---but is the murderer?
Although Thornton introduces a new group of characters to her readers, they live in the same mountains and desert in which we met and loved the Victim’s Advocate, Chloe Newcombe. Readers will be cheering for all these new friends as they do their best to clear Jackson’s name---often at peril to themselves.

Betsy Thornton works for the Cochise County Attorney’s Victim Witness Program as a victim compensation advocate and a victim advocate. She lives in Bisbee, Arizona.