It was a typical late summer evening in Riley County, Kansas. The kind where the cicadas hummed a lazy tune and the air still held the day's warmth, even as dusk painted the sky in hues of lavender and orange. Maeve O'Connell, proprietor and sole detective of the Prairie Shadows Detective Agency, was on her cabin's front porch, nursing a cup of lukewarm coffee. Her gaze drifted over the familiar silhouette of the Flint Hills, a landscape she knew like the back of her hand, when the shrill ring of her cell phone shattered the tranquility.