The Girls in the Snow (Nikki Hunt #1) - Stacy Green Page 0,113
County’s legal department issue a statement on his behalf. While it did acknowledge the DNA evidence could have been tested earlier, the statement didn’t include an apology or admittance of failure.
Rumor was Hardin was stepping down. Miller had promised to keep Nikki updated.
A message from Rory lit up her phone.
Going to my aunt’s to celebrate. You can stop by if you want.
Nikki wasn’t sure she was ready for that. Mark’s parents hadn’t been openly hostile, but she doubted they’d welcome her to a celebration.
Need to spend day with Lacey. Happy for you all, she replied.
“Mommy, I’m hungry.”
“I know, honey. Give me just one more minute.”
Okay. Call me tonight?
Nikki quickly sent a thumbs up and hoped she wasn’t coming across as too cold. They were all navigating uncharted waters.
“It’s been a minute, Mom. I’m dying of starvation here.”
Nikki laughed and merged into traffic. She listened to Lacey chatting as she drove through town and thought about how life tended to come full circle. A few weeks ago, Nikki wouldn’t have considered setting foot in Stillwater, and when she did arrive, everything felt foreign to her. Stillwater had grown and changed, and yet so much of it stayed the same, just like Nikki. She was no longer the wild teenager, but she remembered those days much more clearly now. She wasn’t as scared to look back at the past.
Nikki wasn’t sure exactly where her life was headed, but she was no longer “the girl whose parents were murdered.”
And that was good enough for now.
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Books by Stacy Green
Nikki Hunt Series
The Girls in the Snow
A Letter from Stacy
I want to say a huge thank you for choosing to read The Girls in the Snow. I’m very excited about the upcoming books in the Nikki Hunt series! If you enjoyed The Girls in the Snow and want to keep up to date with all my latest releases, just sign up at the following link. Your email address will never be shared, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
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In 2012, two cousins named Lyric, aged ten, and Elizabeth, aged eight, disappeared from Evansdale, Iowa. The two girls had been riding their bikes and had been spotted earlier in the day but then disappeared with very few leads. At the time, my own daughter was six years old, and I followed the case, like so many parents, praying the girls would somehow be found alive. Their remains were discovered several months later, but the case is still unsolved at the time of writing. The case took its toll on the FBI agents who were called in to help the Iowa Bureau of Investigation, and it still continues to haunt Iowans.
While The Girls in the Snow is vastly different from the Lyric and Elizabeth case, the idea of two young people disappearing with no leads is something that’s always stuck with me. The toll that cases like this take on the law enforcement officers working them is enormous and something I wanted to explore with this new series.
I hope you loved The Girls in the Snow, and if you did, I would be very grateful if you could write a review. I’d love to hear what you think, and it makes such a difference helping new readers to discover one of my books for the first time.
I love hearing from my readers—you can get in touch on my Facebook page, through Twitter, Goodreads or my website.
Thanks,
Stacy
stacygreenauthor.com
Acknowledgments
There are so many people who helped this book come together. Thank you to my husband for never losing faith in me, and to my daughter for always being honest and willing to listen to my ideas. And a special thanks to her for letting me measure her to see how big of a freezer I needed.
Thank you to Kristine Kelly for being there through all of my writing and life’s ups and downs. Thanks to John Kelly for his fabulous tour of Stillwater all those years ago, and special thanks to Jan Barton for her love and friendship.
Stillwater, MN is a very real town and is considered the birthplace of Minnesota. It’s a charming, historic place on the St. Croix River, and an idyllic spot for a small-town mystery. Many thanks to the Washington County Sheriff, as well as the Hennepin County Medical Examiner, for their help with my research questions.
Thank you to John Douglas for his guidance on profiling a case and reminding me to always start with the victim. Thanks to Lee Lofland, Sirchie, and Writers Police Academy for helping me create believable cops.
Thank you to the Minnesota Innocence Project for taking the time to answer my questions.
I want to give a very special thank you to my Bookouture editor, Jennifer Hunt. Working with her has been an amazing experience, and I’m so grateful she had enough faith in me to stay in touch until the time was right for us to work together.
Finally, thank you to my readers for sticking with me. I hope you love Nikki Hunt, and I’m excited for the series’ future!
We – both author and publisher – hope you enjoyed this book. We believe that you can become a reader at any time in your life, but we’d love your help to give the next generation a head start.
Did you know that 9% of children don’t have a book of their own in their home, rising to 13% in disadvantaged families*? We’d like to try to change that by asking you to consider the role you could play in helping to build readers of the future.
We’d love you to get involved by sharing, borrowing, reading, buying or talking about a book with a child in your life and spreading the love of reading. We want to make sure the next generation continues to have access to books, wherever they come from.
Click HERE for a list of brilliant books to share with a child – as voted by Goodreads readers.
Stacy Green has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.
eBook ISBN: 978-1-83888-879-4
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events other than those clearly in the public domain, are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.