You’d think that a man would get used to the screaming.

It had become a daily affair, varying in pitch and length but otherwise consistent. Sometimes, it would catch Tim by surprise and he’d forget who was making the sound altogether. It hadn’t been so long ago that the house was silent. Just him and Shana, spending their evenings with glasses of wine in hand and heads close. They’d talk about the latest case to befall the New York State Police’s Troop D. Share theories from their unique perspectives: Tim as an investigator and long-time local, Shana as the troop’s senior investigator, formerly with NYPD Homicide. Now, it was those screams that dominated the house Tim and Shana shared as husband and wife.

Such was life with a toddler.

In all honesty, Tim was happy to hear them – now more than ever. The past few days had been spent deep in an investigation that had gotten under Tim’s skin. Lately, he’d found himself not only looking over his shoulder, but checking the front closet, basement, and under the bed. In a house a couple of towns over, a woman had been found doing something called phrogging, which Tim had come to learn meant she’d been living in the home undetected, right alongside the owner. When the owner was home, she would hide in the attic. When he wasn’t, she’d roam about, shower, and check the fridge for food she could forage before he came back. The very idea that someone could be so invasive and reckless chilled Tim to his core. He hadn’t been able to wipe the horrific notion from his mind.

Not even after the trespasser revealed that, while secretly living in the house, she’d found a human skeleton in the basement crawlspace.

“Dada!” Darcy’s voice was shrill, but it made Tim’s heart heave in a way that warmed him head to toe. “Bat time!”

The nightly ritual had become one of his favorite activities of all. He found his daughter in the upstairs bathroom with Shana, her dense little body surrounded by lavender-scented bubbles and bobbing bath toys. It wasn’t until this moment, late in the day, that Tim felt there was actually a chance he could relax. Forget about the case at hand, if only for a short time. There was work to be done to piece together the mystery of the woman and the bones, but here, in the house on Otter Creek way up in New York State’s North Country, the kid took precedence.

And tonight, if all went well, Tim might just be able to keep her screams at bay.

IN THE BONES — A “North Country” Mystery, Book 1
Genre: Police Procedural
Release: November 2025
Format: Print, Digital, Audio
Amazon | Barnes and Noble

The arrival of a celebrity athlete on a remote peninsula in New York’s Thousand Islands unearths dark and deadly buried secrets in this heart-pounding blend of suspense and mystery, the first in the new North Country series—Agatha Christie meets Ruth Ware and Lucy Foley

It’s almost summer in Cape Vincent, and as the heat rises, ex-professional ice hockey superstar Mikko Helle arrives, ready to move into his extravagantly renovated waterfront home. Mikko is 30, handsome, and wealthy. He’s a stranger in town. There’s no reason to suspect Mikko is anything other than he seems.

Local married mother-of-two Nicole Durham works her connections hard to get hired as his cleaner. She needs this job—and not just because of the money. Nicole is desperate to expose a secret, and she’s running out of time.

But when Nicole disturbs an intruder while cleaning, New York State Police Investigator Tim Wellington discovers that the luxury mansion is hiding its own unthinkable truth. Deep in the basement lie the bones of a young woman, identity unknown.

The celebrity athlete. The local. The thief. Everyone is hiding something—but someone in the North Country’s a ruthless killer, and one of the three knows exactly who it is.

About the author
Tessa Wegert is the critically acclaimed author of the Shana Merchant mysteries, as well as the North Country series, beginning with In the Bones. Her books have received numerous starred reviews and have been featured on PBS and NPR Radio. A former journalist and copywriter, Tessa grew up in Quebec and now lives with her husband and children in Connecticut, where she co-founded Sisters in Crime CT and serves on the board of International Thriller Writers (ITW).