The characters are emotionally complex, both the good and the bad.

In this novel, 'thrill ride' is just too tame a description. Before it's over, justice must be served, honor returned and past lies exposed and confronted. The action builds to a crescendo of violence in Ransom River that will overwhelm everyone involved. Thomas Wolfe says 'You can't go home again.' Rory learns you can never escape your home. Before it's all over, the grim facts of her family's past will rise up to change all she has ever known and believed. She is summoned to jury duty and in Meg Gardiner's trademark tale telling, an explosive attack on the courthouse begins a long and terrifying ordeal. Rory Mackenzie has returned home to a place she swore she would never revisit. The Fourth of July and a new Meg Gardiner thriller. There are two things I love about summer. Ransom River is an intimate, atmospheric thriller with a dark mystery at its heart - one that will keep listeners breathless until the very end. Departing from her popular series novels, Meg Gardiner has gone deeper than ever into the utterly convincing lives and compelling pasts of her characters.

But in the wake of a desperate attack on the courthouse, Rory realizes that exposing these dark skeletons has connected her to an old case that was never solved, and bringing the truth to light just might destroy her. While most of the town is focused on the tense and shocking circumstances of the trial, Rory’s return to Ransom River dredges up troubling memories from her childhood that she can no longer ignore. She retreated into herself when both her career aspirations and her love affair with a childhood friend, undercover cop Seth Colder, were destroyed in a tragic accident. Brilliant yet guarded, Rory has always felt like an outsider. It’s a place she vowed never to visit again after leaving behind its surfeit of regret and misfortune and the specter of a troubled past that threatened to disturb the town’s peaceful facade. Rory Mackenzie is juror number seven on a high-profile murder case in her hometown of Ransom Ri- ver, California.

Ransom River by Meg Gardiner