The big dig: a Carlotta Carlyle mystery

Carlotta Carlyle, the six-foot-tall redheaded private investigator, thought that working undercover searching out fraud on Boston's Big Dig would be a challenging assignment. After all, the Big Dig, the creation of a central artery tunnel running beneath crowded downtown Boston is an engineering marvel, the largest urban construction project in modern history, a fourteen billion dollar boondoggle in the eyes of protesters. Playing a mild-mannered secretary working out of a construction trailer is not quite the thrill ride she had in mind.

Carlotta decides to moonlight, taking on a missing persons case, but the search for Veronica James turns up one dead end after another. So do her fraud investigations on the Dig, and soon it looks like Carlotta has dug herself one big hole. But then a break-in at Veronica's coupled with the mysterious death of a construction worker on one of the sites stirs up a storm, and soon enough Carlotta is in over her head in more ways than one.

Suspenseful, unpredictable, and vivid, The Big Dig is a startling return to form for one of the masters of the crime genre.