The dog days of summer have arrived, and Tai Randolph is feeling the heat. Running her uncle’s gun shop is more demanding than she had ever imagined. Her best friend, Rico, is competing for a national slam poetry title, and Atlanta is overrun with hundreds of fame-hungry performance poets clogging all the good bars.

Tai also has to deal with her new relationship with corporate security agent Trey Seaver. Trey, SWAT trained and rule obsessed, has a brain geared for statistics and flow charts, not romance. And while Tai finds him irresistibly fascinating, dating a human lie detector who can kill with his bare hands is a somewhat precarious endeavor.

Just when she thinks she has a handle on things, one of Rico’s fellow poets is murdered—and Rico becomes the prime suspect.

Tai rolls up her sleeves and comes to Rico’s defense with every trick in her book, including a little lying here, a little snooping there. Trey wants her off the case immediately. So does Rico. Every poet in Atlanta has a secret, it seems, and one of them is willing to kill to keep their own quiet. But someone else wants her on the job, someone dropping her anonymous clues and clandestine tip offs, someone with an agenda that appears to be either positively heroic or downright deadly.

Will Tai’s relationship with Trey survive another foray into amateur sleuthing? And even more importantly, will she?

It’s taken almost a year, but Tai Randolph has her new life together. She’s running a semi-successful Atlanta gun shop catering to Civil War reenactors. Her lover, the sexy if security-obsessed Trey Seaver, is sorting out his challenges. There’s not a single corpse on her horizon, and her previously haphazard existence is finally stable, secure … and unsurprising. Then a tornado blows by a Kennesaw Mountain cemetery, scattering the skeletal remains of a Confederate hero. Assisting the bones recovery effort is a job her late Uncle Dexter would have relished, as does Tai. Does she hit the jackpot on discovering a jumble of bones in the underbrush?

No. The bones reveal a more recent murder, with her deceased uncle leading the suspect list. As Tai struggles to clear Dexter’s name–and save the business he left her–she uncovers deadly secrets also buried in the red Georgia clay and realizes there’s a live murderer on the loose, a clever killer who has tried to conceal the crimes of the present in the stories of the past. As she risks her own life to unravel two mysteries–one from a previous century, one literally at her doorstep–Tai rediscovers her dangerous taste for murder and mayhem.

Reckoning and ruin. That’s what Savannah is to private eye Tai Randolph, who has gladly rebooted her life in Atlanta and is celebrating several landmarks. A year running the Confederate-themed gun shop she inherited with its busy schedule of reenactments. A year with her sexy, ex-SWAT lover, Trey, now working a corporate security gig, who’s having to reboot his own life and brain after a terrible auto accident. A year of confronting a checkered list of ruffians and outright villains, mostly now put behind bars. One of those convicted criminals is her cousin Jasper, whose disreputable family was a big part of Tai’s childhood in Savannah.

Tai is determined to keep her amateur sleuthing in the past, not just for her sake but for Trey’s as well. But here comes Jasper again, complete with a fancy, high-priced new lawyer and a scheme that will surely ruin Tai and Trey financially. But is there more? Jasper, the leader of a white militia splinter group too violent for even the Klan, must be up to something worse than wrecking Tai’s life. When witnesses against Jasper start turning up dead, she decides she has to take him down once and for all. She must act on her own–a strategy that high-adrenaline Tai has been working to modify in her life with Trey.

Soon Tai is back in Savannah and deep in familiar troubles–a missing ex-boyfriend, a creepily poetic stalker, a passel of stolen money. She’s forced to confront old memories and older ghosts, including an uncomfortable reunion with her Uncle Boone, who’s keeping secrets he’d rather die with than reveal. Worst of all, her relationship with Trey starts to fray, and she realizes that chasing the truth might cost her the man she loves.

Reckoning and Ruin is the fifth in an exquisitely crafted series filled with atmosphere, humor, deep emotional connections, and surprising plots.

Tai Randolph thinks inheriting a Confederate-themed gun shop is her biggest headache—until she finds a murdered corpse in her brother’s driveway. Even worse, her supposedly respectable brother begins behaving in decidedly non-innocent ways, like fleeing to the Bahamas and leaving her with both a homicide in her lap and the pointed suspicions of the Atlanta Police Department directed her way. Suddenly, she has to worry about clearing her own name, not just that of her wayward sibling.

Complicating her search for answers is Trey Seaver, field agent for Phoenix, an exclusive corporate security firm hired to investigate the crime. Seaver is fearless, focused, and utterly impervious to bribes, threats, and clever deceptions. Still in recovery from the car accident that left him cognitively and emotionally damaged, Seaver has constructed a world of certainty and routine. He has powerful people to answer to, and the last thing he wants is an unpredictable stranger “detecting” on Phoenix turf.

Tai’s inquiry leads her from the cold-eyed glamour of Atlanta’s adult-entertainment scene to the gilded treachery of Tuxedo Road. Potential suspects abound, including violent stalkers, vengeful sisters, and a paparazzo with a taste for meth. But it takes another murder—and threats to her own life—to make Tai realize that to solve this crime she has to trust the most dangerous man she’s ever met.