Last night's earthquake has the California Gold Country town of Flat Skunk buzzing; and over her morning mocha, deaf newswoman Connor Westphal is shaping it into a lead story for her local paper, the Eureka! Then her TTY phone brings more sensational news: a twisted corpse has been found on a construction site owned by her rival publisher, Harlan Truax. What was the dead soil engineer doing there at midnight, and was it the quake that toppled him four stories to his death? An act of God--or human malevolence?

Connor is soon back in the sleuth business, uncovering Flat Skunk's darkest secrets: from toxic dirt to tainted relationships. But someone's out to stop her, and they're saying it with flowers, verses, menacing e- mail--and a series of murders that could knock the numbers off the Richter scale and silence one lip-reading reporter forever.

From the Paperback edition.