Where There’s Smoke
Coldren County Book 2
Rachel Louise Adams
Minotaur Books
October 2026
Where There’s Smoke by Rachel Louise Adams can be read separately, but it will be helpful to read book one, No Rest for the Wicked, first. Reading these two books in order will provide an overview of the returning characters in this book since the storylines from the previous book are carried over.
“This is a sequel to the first book, No Rest for the Wicked. The first book takes place, six months before Where There’s Smoke. In that book, readers see how Dolores reacts to her trauma, how it impacted her relationships, her marriage, her way of growing up and how she’s also separating from all those mechanisms including being raped. In this book, she’s becoming a different person after the divorce, in a very pragmatic way. When we open the series, in No Rest for the Wicked, Dolores returns to Littleport Wisconsin, the town that she grew up in. Dolores’ rape is central to book one. She is confronting the things that she left behind and understanding that a lot of what she understood about her town, her family, their secrets and everything is not quite as she thought. There’s a series arc going on with the trial and everything she encountered. The full context of that is much more available in book one. And the first book was much more focused on Dolores’ brother Asher. So, in book two, I centered it on the relationship with Josie, her sister.”
The plot has Dolores Hawthorne divorced, trading her profession as a forensic pathologist for a job as a medical examiner, living in small-town Wisconsin to be closer to her family. At the same time, Dolores is still receiving threatening Halloween cards based on an incident that happened when she was a teen in the area. She has brought the case to the attention of law enforcement which is why she is being threatened. Many of these incidents are presented in book one. Dolores is an interesting character who is clearly dealing with damage from her past while still doing exceptional work. She is very intelligent and intuitive.
“Dolores is vulnerable, likes to keep to herself, has a back history, a workaholic, from a wealthy family, and an overthinker. She keeps to herself in the sense that she’s certainly not a very social person and mostly married to her work. She’s more competent around dead bodies than living ones for sure. Dolores had a very brutal trauma that happens to her in her senior year of high school and it’s on Halloween. It was a core part of her identity and her role in the community with all that becomes very much tainted in horror and trauma. It’s a vivid trigger response that she gets around the holiday. It’s a kryptonite, basically.”
FBI Agent Kate Butcher is a clever character and apparently had a backstory with Dolores as a classmate. Kate’s supervisor FBI Agent Paul Turner is also intelligent and capable.
“The comparisons between Kate and Paul come out more in this book. Both Kate and Dolores are not people persons although one is ice and the other one is much more fire. I would not call either Kate or Paul friends with her. For now, they are working together. If you take Dolores full spectrum, she’s in control, she’s very cold. She’s very much oriented toward restraint, whereas, he’s the kind of person who’s going to eat the last two cookies from a box. He is very much oriented toward immediate gratification and fun, and I think she would very much be planning before she does anything. Such as, what consequence is this going to have, not only tomorrow, but like in the next ten years, while I think he doesn’t overthink.”
Dolores is also dealing with murder victim Benedict Marcy II, beloved big business employer, owner of the Marcy’s Meats slaughterhouse. Then a local cop who was transporting evidence samples is killed and most of the evidence is missing. It will take the intelligence of Dolores, Paul, and Kate to collect enough evidence and follow the clues to discover what is really going on.
There are many nuanced characters who readers want to get to know better. The story has many contradictions, twists, and surprises.
