The Cantaloupe Thief

The worst thing about being homeless is being looked right through.

When reporter Branigan Powers is assigned to write a tenth-anniversary story about her town’s only unsolved murder, she finds an interesting angle: the area’s homeless population. Police always suspected that their failure to apprehend the wealthy widow’s killer was because the murderer was a transient who quickly fled the area.

Now Branigan has an in with the hidden people of Grambling, Georgia. Her friend, Liam, is the pastor of a church that runs a homeless shelter. With his help, Branigan meets Malachi Ezekiel Martin, a street-dwelling veteran who is accustomed to being unseen and unheard. When it comes to solving a murder, such invisibility may be helpful.

But as Branigan and Malachi begin poking into the odd circumstances surrounding the decade-old murder, people start dying. Are the new deaths simply a byproduct of the casual violence that comes with life on the street? Or has Branigan’s investigation awakened a sleeping killer?