The Bitter Past: A Mystery Audiobook

Sheriff Porter Beck’s life in the high desert of Nevada is relatively quiet, until an old retired FBI agent is found tortured and murdered. Clues at the scene point to a mystery dating back to the early days of the nuclear age and a long-ago, all-but-forgotten Russian spy.

Porter Beck left Lincoln County to join the Army, where he worked deep in the shadows of far-off places. Now he’s back, doing the same lawman’s job his father did for decades until he started to develop dementia. There’s not much violent crime in Lincoln County, making this murder stand out, and when the FBI comes calling—in the person of the alluring Agent Sana Locke—Beck knows that there’s something much bigger going on.

To catch the killer, Beck must first find the KGB agent who came to steal America’s secrets sixty years earlier. With the somewhat complicated help of his very complicated stepsister, Brinley, and the unexpected intrusion of his own intelligence past, Beck must unravel the truth about that KGB agent and the world’s first dirty bomb, two things the United States government cannot afford to have revealed.

As the body count climbs, so do the stakes for him and those he loves, especially when that alluring federal agent makes it impossible to know who can and can’t be trusted.

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“A compelling story with two timelines and elements of mystery, espionage, and history.”

— Library Journal (starred review)