Emily Kenyon

About the Emily Kenyon series

Emily Kenyon is a sheriff's detective in the small Washington apple-country town of Cherrystone -- divorced, raising a teenage daughter, and working cases that keep dragging her small town's polite surface up against real violence. Across two books, Gregg Olsen sends her after a killer targeting young women in A Cold Dark Place and then into a case that reopens old wounds in Heart of Ice, both set against the same close-knit, secret-keeping Pacific Northwest small-town backdrop that runs through most of his crime fiction.

The series is short, but it's an early example of the template Olsen would return to across his later detective series: a capable, somewhat isolated female investigator; a specific, well-researched Washington setting; and cases built on the kind of buried-secret plotting his true-crime background trained him to construct.