I’m Monongahela County Coroner Zoe Chambers-Adams, and I’ve been watching the weather forecast for days.

I was in my late teens when Hurricane Ivan—or Tropical Storm Ivan by the time it reached us—created flooding like I’d never seen before here in southwestern Pennsylvania. I’m talking flooding that literally moved concrete blocks into the middle of an intersection! That, my friend, is serious flooding.

Prior to Ivan, my memories of hurricanes were of something that affected coastal areas. We were too far inland to get more than some rain and maybe some wind. And that might’ve still been true except for the days of rainstorms we’d had before Ivan arrived. The ground was soaked. The creeks were already high. Add five more inches of precipitation in one 24-hour period and you have concrete blocks washed into the middle of the road.

And one freaked out teenager.

Now here we are, more than twenty years later, and the forecast looks eerily similar. We’re soaked from a weather system that’s been moving sluggishly across the upper Midwest and into Pennsylvania. And Hurricane Iona is pummeling Louisiana. Those poor folks in New Orleans.

I’ve been hoping the weather radar models would show its northward path starting to veer further east or west, but now it looks like Monongahela County is doomed to take a direct hit sometime tomorrow.

I’m grateful that my husband Vance Township Police Chief Pete Adams and I live on a farm on top of a hill. Others aren’t as lucky. Tonight, Pete and I will start adding temporary stalls to our barn and put out the word to our lowland friends with horses in case they need to move their livestock to higher ground.

Oh, excuse me. There’s my phone. It’s Marsdale Police Department. I have to take this.

Well, it looks like Pete will have to start without me. Across the county, the police have discovered a body, likely a drug overdose victim. Duty calls.

Helpless, A Zoe Chambers Mystery Book #12
Genre: Suspense
Release: May 2023
Format: Print, Digital
Purchase Link

As a massive weather system barrels toward them, Vance Township Police Chief Pete Adams and his wife, County Coroner Zoe Chambers-Adams, soon learn how unprepared they really are. A 911 call reports a dead young mother, her critically injured husband, and their missing seven-year-old daughter. Pete and Zoe realize that as the storm moved north from Louisiana, a mysterious killer came with it.

The wounded and trapped father is Zoe’s friend and blacksmith, and he asks her to stay with him during the rescue efforts. Pete encourages her to oblige, hoping she can uncover clues that might help the investigation. But as attempts to free the victim fail and his condition worsens, Zoe’s questions reveal he doesn’t know why his family was targeted and child kidnapped. Yet he stays alive, hoping for one last glimpse of his little girl.

Pursuing the murderer and the kidnapped child, Pete and his officers battle downed trees, massive flooding, and a widespread loss of communications. They’re isolated with no backup, while facing rising water and impassable roads. The killer faces the same problems, yet somehow stays one step ahead of law enforcement. But he is becoming desperate, and more people are dying because of it.

As two lives hang in the balance, can Pete win the race against time and weather to stop a savage and cunning predator? And will he and Zoe be able to reunite a family before it’s too late?

About the author
USA Today bestseller Annette Dashofy is the author of over a dozen novels. Her standalone, Death By Equine, is the 2021 winner of the Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award for excellence in thoroughbred racing literature. She is also the author of Where the Guilty Hide, the first in her new Detective Honeywell series set on the shores of Lake Erie. Helpless is the twelfth and latest in her multi-Agatha-Award-nominated Zoe Chambers mystery series about a paramedic-turned-coroner in rural Pennsylvania.

All comments are welcomed.