Lee Martin: The Day that Dusty Died (USA 1993)

From the Publisher:
"Debra, I've got to ask you-Rhonda's been telling me the most awful things about your dad -- they're not true, are they?"
I sat up. In a loud, harsh voice I scarcely recognized as my own, I told my mother, "Let the past be the past."
After she left, silently, I sat up for a long time thinking...

Fort Worth Police Detective Deb Ralston ought to know that she can't follow her own advice to leave well enough alone. For example, there's Dusty Miller: a popular, pretty, straight "A" student who leaps off her fourteenth-story balcony just before Deb barrels onto the scene. Too late. It's out of her hands, everyone tells her, but the question of why Dusty did it keeps nagging at Deb.

That's not all, of course. Partially laid up after foot surgery, Deb grudgingly agrees to work in the Sex Crimes Unit, where she'll be the only woman and maybe the only one competent enough to get to the bottom of tricky cases like the Super Glue rapist and the overfriendly Mr. Washington.

Deb finds the work disturbing, especially since she can't seem to stop thinking about her own dreadful childhood. Life at home isn't easy either, what with the reappearance of her desperately ill younger sister Rhonda after a ten-year absence, her mother's insistence that Deb needs her overbearing brand of help, and her husband's tendency to keep his thoughts to himself. And the dreams, of poison-spitting snakes and tidal waves, peppered with Dusty and Rhonda and the girl whose mother killed her, that appear whenever she closes her eyes.

Lee Martin: The Day that Dusty Died. A Deb Ralston Mystery. St. Martin's Press, ISBN: 0312097794 (March, 1993), 298 p., $20.95.