Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Three Towns Away: A Cold Case, a DNA Match, and the Story Everyone Got Wrong

Three Towns Away: A Cold Case, a DNA Match, and the Story Everyone Got Wrong

Kirkland, Adele

Paperback

Mystery & Thriller

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN13: 9798171516574
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 336
Weight: 1.00
Height: 0.70 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
A cold-case DNA match. A man condemned without a trial. A killer who may have spent thirty-seven years living only three towns away.

In 1989, nineteen-year-old Emily Mercer was murdered outside the small town of Greyhaven. No one was ever charged-but the sheriff, the newspapers and the community decided local handyman Thomas Bell was guilty.

Greyhaven repeated that story until suspicion became history.

When preserved crime-scene DNA is retested in 2026, the result does not confirm what everyone believed. It excludes Thomas Bell completely. Then forensic genealogy uncovers a distant familial match in a public genealogy database. Somewhere within an ordinary family tree is the identity of the person who left biological evidence on Emily's clothing-and the genetic trail points toward Dunley, only three towns away.

Investigative journalist Elise Harrow is assigned to cover the reopened cold case. For Elise, the story is painfully personal. Fourteen years earlier, retired Sheriff Owen Calder admitted there had been one forensic result he never trusted. She failed to ask the question that might have exposed the truth sooner.

Now Elise joins methodical cold-case detective Lena Corbett as they return to the original files, reinterview aging witnesses and reconstruct Emily's final night. But the deeper they look, the less reliable Greyhaven's accepted story becomes.

A frightened witness may remember more than he actually saw. A forgotten police report describes an unidentified stranger near Emily's workplace. Thomas Bell lied about where he was that night-but perhaps not for the reason everyone assumed. And the sheriff who built the case against him still refuses to accept that his certainty may have allowed the real killer to disappear.

The DNA can identify a family.

It cannot explain how an entire town came to believe something that was never proven-or what someone might do when a thirty-seven-year-old lie finally reaches his front door.

Three Towns Away is an atmospheric cold-case mystery blending forensic genealogy, investigative journalism, small-town secrets, wrongful suspicion and emotionally grounded police procedural fiction.

The town remembered a killer. The evidence remembered the truth.

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