The Bottom Line: The kind of second series book that fans expect: bigger stakes, harder questions and much more to lose.
The second book in James Foley’s Lisa Owens series moves its protagonist from Miami homicide work into an FBI investigation stretching between Washington, D.C., and North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains.
Foley begins with a massacre whose consequences will echo for half a century, opening in 1972 with sixteen-year-old Violet Clausen, a Black teenager from a North Carolina mountain community, preparing to marry Albert Gaines when their Black church congregation gathers beside a river for his baptism. A gunman opens fire, killing dozens, including members of Violet’s family and the young man she was about to marry.
Foley flashes forward fifty years, introducing FBI agent Lisa Owens as she is assigned to a very different but equally disturbing outbreak of violence: coordinated bomb attacks on the Washington, D.C., homes of three prominent Black members of Congress. Still adjusting to life in the Bureau, Lisa is surrounded by highly specialized colleagues and privately wonders whether she truly belongs among them.
What initially looks like an urgent domestic-terrorism investigation soon begins pulling her toward the Blue Ridge Mountains and a history that has never entirely gone away.
In the first series book, Foley depicted Lisa becoming a police officer in response to the unsolved murder of her fiancé, Scott Diaz, and the subsequent killing of her close friend Dorothy. Grief drove her forward, work gave that grief purpose, and solving murders offered the possibility of providing others with the closure she had been denied. In Blue Ridge, Lisa is now an FBI agent working among specialists whose abilities make her question whether she belongs, forcing her to move from self-reliance toward trust, collaboration and leadership.
Foley wisely complicates Lisa’s challenge by making the investigation about more than identifying the bombers. The attacks are politically explosive, the evidence points toward organised racial hatred, and pressure within the FBI complicates an investigation in which information and trust are increasingly valuable commodities. Her mentor, Bernadette “Bernie” Washington, believes in Lisa’s investigative instincts, but Bernie’s unusually intense response to the case suggests that her interest may be more than professional.
Meanwhile, another disturbing mystery is developing in the mountains. Local businessman and basketball coach Clay Jones becomes the prime suspect when two missing young men are found buried in his backyard, with forensic evidence apparently tying him to their deaths. Nearby, Lisa’s friend Clara Anders begins volunteering at a year-round school for orphaned and abandoned children. She gradually realises that frightened students are concealing something far darker than ordinary disciplinary problems. Anticipating the possibility that these stories may intersect raises the suspense considerably.
Throughout, Foley demonstrates through character and action how prejudice survives through families and institutions, and how people seeking power can turn inherited grievance into a weapon. The novel is equally interested in trust: the difficulty of earning it, the damage caused when it is manipulated, and the possibility of connection across histories designed to divide. That depth is likely to keep readers coming back for future series books.
Readers who missed Foley’s first series book can easily enjoy Blue Ridge as a standalone.
