Near Miss

At precisely 9:27 PM, Malachi Lindquist's coworker watched him leave work. At 9:50, while cycling, he was hit by a car and killed near the entrance to a park, six miles away. The case would have been completely dismissed by the Seattle police department, if not for a bizarre time discrepancy: the restaurant where Malachi works and the park where he was found dead are forty minutes away by bike.

Through a secondhand connection, Rhiannon Valdez, problem-solver and geek medical student, becomes once again embroiled in a suspicious death. Working quietly to avoid the attention of an obnoxious police detective, Rhiannon is determined to figure out who's lying and why.

Sylvie Stein, Rhiannon's investigative partner, is hard at work on her own case: someone is trying to kill Magdalen Hawk, but their attempts are carried out so poorly that Magdalen herself is happy to laugh it off. With the help of her best friend and police informant Rorie Redmond, Sylvie's investigations turn up a wild scattering of motives... but even her impeccable logic can't seem to find anyone with the opportunity to kill Magdalen.

As the mystery deepens and the cases begin to look less and less like accidents, Rhiannon and Sylvie learn the truth about their investigative talents: to truly solve such a complex problem, they must turn to each other.