Carlotta Carlyle, the six-foot-tall redheaded private investigator, thought that working undercover searching out fraud on Boston's Big Dig would be a challenging assignment. After all, the Big Dig, the creation of a central artery tunnel running beneath crowded downtown Boston is an engineering marvel, the largest urban construction project in modern history, a fourteen-billion- dollar boondoggle in the eyes of protesters. Playing a mild-mannered secretary working out of a construction trailer is not quite the thrill ride she had in mind.

Carlotta decides to moonlight, taking on a missing person's case, but the search for Veronica James turns up one dead end after another. So do her fraud investigations on the Dig, and soon it looks like Carlotta has dug herself into one big hole. But then a break-in at Veronica's, coupled with the mysterious death of a construction worker on one of the sites, stirs up a storm, and soon enough Carlotta is in over her head in more ways than one...

Amazon.com Review
When PI Carlotta Carlyle is hired to go underground in the newest title in Linda Barnes's popular series, it's more than a figure of speech; she's investigating rumored theft and corruption on the big dig of the title, Boston's multibillion dollar tunnel project. She's also involved in another case, that of a missing woman whose friend, wealthy Brahmin Dana Endicott, knows that even if Victoria left her job tending bar or her other job caring for animals at a local dog-grooming company without giving notice, she would never have abandoned her beloved dog, who's been left behind at Endicott's Back Bay brownstone. Then a workman who alerted authorities that things were disappearing from the dig site dies in a fall that might be an industrial accident but on closer investigation, begins to look like murder. It takes the determined Carlyle a few more beats before she links her two cases with the big Patriot's Day celebration planned at Faneuil Hall on the anniversary of the Waco massacre, but by the time she has, she's located the missing woman and a kidnapped teenager, foiled the bad guys, and managed to bed an undercover FBI agent--attagirl, Carlotta! A lively and engaging heroine in a tidy mystery whose fast-paced narrative slows but doesn't stop for the details about Boston's ambitious, overdue, and overbudget urban renewal project. --Jane Adams