The Wolf in Winter

A homeless man is found dead in the woods, and when private investigator Charlie Parker goes looking for his missing daughter, he arrives at the small Maine town of Prosperous, a community that has survived every economic and natural catastrophe of the past three centuries with its prosperity mysteriously intact. At its heart lie the ruins of a church transported stone by stone from England centuries ago. Prosperous protects its own and wants no outsiders, and in Parker it senses a threat unlike anything it has faced before.

Jeff Harding narrates with the slow, atmospheric dread that the best Connolly entries demand, building the town's wrongness through accumulation rather than shock. His Parker is by now a familiar presence in this narrator's catalog, and Harding uses that familiarity to amplify how unsettled Parker becomes as the investigation deepens. This Goodreads Choice Award winner is one of the series' strongest, and the narration matches its ambitions.