Excerpt from The Stone Girl by Dirk Wittenborn, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Evie saw the solitary mourner when Clinger got back from the airport. He was skinny, young, and had a backpack slung across his shoulder. His black suit was rumpled and he wore red high- top sneakers. As Langley hurried up onto the front porch to talk to the sheriff, the wrinkled young man walked out on the bulkhead like a zombie and stared at the water.

Unable to find the key to Charlie's BMW, the deputies broke the window with a claw hammer, but couldn't figure out how to turn off the car alarm.

Sheriff Dunn had set up a tape recorder in Valhalla's grand dining hall and put on a show of making it look more social than it was. When Win Langley requested to be present during statements, the sheriff acquiesced in the hope of getting a donation for his reelection campaign in the fall; at least that's what Buddy said later.

The Mannheims' gamekeeper was in and out of the room in less than five minutes. All he had to say was that it was foggy and he was a hundred yards away when he saw Charlie get out of his car carrying a cardboard box, go into the boathouse, and turn on the lights. The box contained the wedding gown. By then, one of the canoes that were stored inside the boathouse had been found in the reeds down at the far end of the lake.

Excerpted from The Stone Girl: A Novel by Dirk Wittenborn. Copyright (c) 2020 by by Dirk Wittenborn. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.