Cold water burning

Five years ago someone aboard a scow called Mygirl battered a nine-year-old girl to death, executed her parents, & murdered a boy visiting his friend aboard the ship. When Mygirl was set ablaze, two young men got out with their lives, & a third man was charged with the slayings. But in a crowded courtroom, private eye Cecil Younger helped the accused go free, knowing that the headline-grabbing trial did everything but get at the truth. Now, the man who was charged with the Mygirl murders has disappeared, & his wife believes someone has taken revenge. Cecil starts to investigate, & realizes that the players in the still-unsolved mystery - from the witnesses to the suspect to a retired state trooper who became obsessed with the case - are all on the move. As a storm bears down on the Alaska coast, two people die in separate, sudden&bizarre explosions of gunfire. One step behind the action, Younger is sure that the Mygirl murders are taking a second, deadly toll on those who were touched by them. But to find the answers he needs, Younger must leave the fragile shelter of his life - a life shared with a lover & an infant child. A wooden sloop called the Naked Horse has left harbor for the wind-lashed sea. & out in the perfect storm, chasing the Naked Horse, Cecil Younger will come face to face with everything he thought he knew, with a person he thought he trusted, & with the jagged pieces of a mystery taking on a new, horrifying shape in his mind.