Teeth, Treats and Murder

A year after the Vance case, Santa Barbara dentist Dr. Lila Bennett is riding her strongest year in practice, sharing the office with a newly promoted golden retriever, and keeping a daily eight-forty coffee date with the FBI agent who now occupies the center of her world.

A forty-foot banner for LUMINOUS Dental Wellness appears across State Street with promises of free whitening, same-day work, and family Saturdays, and forty patients leave her in six weeks.

She recognizes a treatment plan for nine unnecessary crowns on a young man she has known since he was nine, and she names the fraud at a Chamber of Commerce meeting while a live microphone sits three feet away.

Ten days later, Dr. Preston Hale is dead in his whitening suite, and more than a hundred witnesses can testify that the dentist across the street publicly called him a fraud.

After Nate goes quiet and offers only a forty-second call that explains nothing, Lila decides she will not wait for anyone.

With her dog at her side and a skill no investigator can copy, she reads the mouths of her patients and discovers that the most damning evidence is the work that was never there.