In a stand-alone departure from King's New York Times best-selling "Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes" series, a decades-old skull has been found at Gardener Estate, a grand mansion on sweeping grounds long owned by an influential California family. Inspector Raquel Laing of the SFPD Cold Case Unit must look back to the Seventies, when young heir Rob Gardener re-created the mansion as a commune from which folks began disappearing. Were they victims of the serial killer known as the Highwayman?

At the start of this intricately plotted mystery from bestseller King (the Mary Russell series), Insp. Raquel Laing, who's with the San Francisco PD's Cold Case Unit, arrives at the Gardener Estate near Palo Alto--once the home of one of California's most influential families--where the remains of a long-buried body have been found on the grounds. Laing believes that the victim may be one of the young women murdered in the Bay Area in the 1970s by a serial killer known as the Highwayman. Flashbacks to the late 1970s show how Rob Gardener, then the estate's multimillionaire owner, turned it into a commune. The loosely knit and ever-changing community included Meadow, "a hippie earth-mother with the political skills of a Chicago mayor," and "a Mephistopheles rock star" known as Rain. Could the killer have some connection with the Gardener family? King skillfully misdirects the reader as the action builds to a surprising resolution. Laing, dubbed "the Sherlock of San Francisco" by her colleagues "for her uncanny ability to put together unrelated facts," is a welcome addition to the ranks of contemporary female detectives. Hopefully, she'll be back for an encore. Agent: Alec Shane, Writers House. (Sept.)