The big dig

Carlotta Carlyle is a private investigator who stands six feet tall and has red hair, which makes blending in hard. She has been hired to go undercover and look into fraud on the Big Dig, the project that buries a central highway tunnel beneath packed downtown Boston. Critics call its roughly fourteen billion dollars a waste, but the work is still among the largest urban construction efforts ever attempted. Her cover is a meek office assistant stationed in a site trailer, a role far removed from the excitement she expected.

To fill her spare hours, Carlotta takes on a missing persons search for Veronica James. Her leads on the missing woman keep running out, and her fraud inquiry on the construction site stalls as well. Just when she seems to be getting nowhere, a break-in at Veronica's home and the unexplained death of a worker on one of the sites bring the case to a boil, and Carlotta finds herself facing danger on several fronts.

The Big Dig is the Carlotta Carlyle mystery by Linda Barnes, a crime novel with tense, unpredictable plotting and a vivid Boston setting.