Lineage Most Lethal

Texas genealogist Lucy Lancaster is spending the week before New Year's Eve at the Hotel Sutton, where she plans to balance business with leisure while preparing a presentation for her client, hotel heiress Pippa Sutton. She is also trying to put Special Agent Ben Turner out of her mind, since he stopped contacting her after a single date. Her plans fall apart when a pale, sweating stranger staggers toward her, presses a vintage Montblanc fountain pen into her palm, whispers "Keep them safe," and dies at her feet.

Lucy shows the pen to her grandfather, a World War II veteran and devoted collector, and learns that he once worked as an Allied spy. The pen points to one of his wartime missions and serves as the key to decoding a microdot the dead man left behind. The microdot holds ciphers, some of which decrypt into names. Lucy suspects these names belong to the descendants of her grandfather's former fellow agents. Two people on the list are soon murdered, one of them the chef at the Hotel Sutton, and her grandfather's life is threatened. Lucy and Pippa may be on the list too, so Lucy must dig into the past to protect the people of the present.

With a covert Allied operation, long-held grudges, and possible traitors everywhere, Lucy turns to her research skills to trace the World War II ancestors named on the list. She has to connect the clues and identify a killer who is intent on ending certain family lines for good. This is the second book in the Ancestry Detective series.