Murder at Haven's Rock: A Novel

by Kelley Armstrong

Overview

New York Times bestselling author Kelley Armstrong’s Rockton Novels had one of the most unique towns in crime fiction. Murder at Haven's Rock is a spinoff, a fresh start... with a few new dangers that threaten everything before it even begins.

Haven’s Rock, Yukon. Population: 0

Deep in the Yukon wilderness, a town is being built. A place for people to disappear, a fresh start from a life on the run. Haven’s Rock isn’t the first town of this kind, something detective Casey Duncan and her husband, Sheriff Eric Dalton, know first-hand. They met in the original town of Rockton. But greed and deception led the couple to financing a new refuge for those in need. This time around, they get to decide which applicants are approved for residency.

There’s only one rule in Haven’s Rock: stay out of the forest. When two of the town's construction crew members break it and go missing, Casey and Eric are called in ahead of schedule to track them down. When a body is discovered, well-hidden with evidence of foul play, Casey and Eric must find out what happened to the dead woman, and locate those still missing. The longer Casey and Eric don’t know what happened, the more danger everyone is in.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250865410
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/21/2023
Series:	Haven's Rock , #1
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	407,184
Product dimensions:	9.40(w) x 6.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

KELLEY ARMSTRONG graduated with a degree in psychology and then studied computer programming. Now, she is a full-time writer and parent, and she lives with her husband and three children in rural Ontario, Canada.

Editorial Reviews

★ 12/19/2022

Armstrong’s excellent first entry in a Rockton spinoff series (after 2022’s Deepest of Secrets) finds Casey Butler and her husband, Sheriff Eric Dalton, who met in Rockton, a Yukon town intended to serve as a refuge for those, such as domestic abuse victims, for whom the legal system’s protections were insufficient, resolved to use her substantial inheritance to self-fund construction of a similar community, Haven’s Rock, after the ideals of Rockton were compromised. The new venture begins badly. Yolanda, the contractor in charge of the project, calls on Casey and Eric for their tracking skills when two members of her team—Penny, the architect, and Bruno, the engineer—disappear after violating the worksite’s prime rule not to wander into the thick neighboring forest. Casey and Eric encounter an unknown person who first flees, and then steals Casey’s backpack after she falls into a camouflaged pit. There, she makes a grim discovery—the stabbed corpse of a woman, who Yolanda says is not her missing employee. Armstrong gives her lead a complex mystery to solve, while vividly evoking the eerie isolation of the setting. Paul Doiron fans will be pleased. Agent: Lucienne Diver, Knight Agency. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for The Rockton Novels

“Kelley Armstrong’s solid Casey Duncan Series… is turning into one of the best new finds of the decade . . . Slick plotting and good characters are hallmarks of this clever series." — The Globe and Mail

“Kelley Armstrong is incredible at writing atmosphere, and it’s on full display in her Casey Duncan series.” — Bustle

“This is a series that covers all the bases.” —St. Louis Post Dispatch

From the Publisher

2022-12-14
The idealistic attempt to carve a new town out of the Yukon snow runs into criminal complications that threaten to reduce the tiny population to zero.

Det. Casey Butler has every reason to be deeply invested in Haven’s Rock. She and her husband, Rockton Sheriff Eric Dalton, have financed the new settlement, breaking away from the marginally more established refuge of Rockton, with money Casey inherited. Her eventful history with Rockton makes her eager for the new town, whose every resident will be hand-picked by Dalton and her, to succeed. So she’s alarmed to learn that three of those residents ignored the place’s paramount rule—don’t go into the forest—and only one of them returned. Yolanda the contractor, last spotted walking into the woods with Bruno the engineer, is back safe and sound, but finding Bruno will become the top priority of Casey and Dalton and their canine and human cohort. Soon after he’s rescued, Bruno goes AWOL from his hospital bed without more than hinting at what happened in the forest, and this time he turns up dead. Even worse, Penny, the architect who followed Yolanda and Bruno when she first saw them walking away from the town in progress, remains missing, presumed dead—until Casey and Dalton find a dead woman who turns out to be Denise, the second wife of Mark, a prospective resident who’s on a secret mission of his own. Few readers will be able to name any of the suspects an hour after putting this spinoff down, but they’ll still be shivering with cold.

Armstrong’s new twist on her Rockton franchise scores higher as wilderness adventure than as mystery.

Kirkus Reviews