Susan Ames is dying. Her only heir is Mary Ellen, her thirty-year-old daughter, who ran off with her political science professor eleven years earlier and hasn't been heard from since. Susan summons her lawyer, Brady Coyne. There is, of course, the matter of the estate - the historic Ames house in Concord, which Susan fears the free-spirited Mary Ellen might convert into a hippie commune. And Brady senses that flinty old Susan would like to hug her wayward daughter one time before she dies.
Can Brady find Mary Ellen, Susan asks? He can try.
He tracks down Mary Ellen's expensive apartment on Beacon Street. But she's not there, and Brady deduces that she's been away for a few weeks. Her answering machine gives him some names. But no one will admit to knowing where she is - not Sherif Rahmanan, the professor who abandoned his family for her; not Sid Raiford, Mary Ellen's aging coke supplier; not troubled young Jill Costello, the superintendent of the building; not Dave Finn, the suspended Boston cop who thinks she's going to marry him; not even her psychiatrist, Warren McAllister.
Then Mary Ellen's drowned body is found near her summer cottage at New Hampshire's Teal Pond. Dr. McAllister rules out suicide. The police, lacking evidence to the contrary, conclude it's an accident. Brady suspects murder. But there are too few clues and too many people with murderous motives. Then the suspects begin turning up dead and the clues multiply. The trail of bodies ultimately leads Brady back to the deep waters of Teal Pond and into the darkness of a desperate soul.
Tight Lines, the eleventh Brady Coyne novel, confirms why The Boston Globe called William G. Tapply "a major-league mystery novelist" and why Brady Coyne, who shares his creator's passions for fishing and justice, was hailed as "one of the most likable sleuths to appear on the crime scene" by The Washington Post.