Welcome to the fictional world of Twin Cities Mysteries, with Detectives Erik Jansson and Deb Metzger.

If you’ve read this far, you trust words. Should you? I once trusted words. As a reader/teacher/scholar, I put my faith in them. As a mystery writer, I put my faith in them differently. I trust that words will misdirect, deceive, and hide desperate deeds and motives.

As we’ve witnessed, the digital revolution has made information readily available and advanced public and personal relationships. We depend on it to foster the ties that bind. (I can’t go a day without logging in.) The digital realm has also been a boon to the arts of deception and prevarication. Any of us can lie online, and others can lie about us. If we share truths, make corrections, will they be heard? To help with the tangle of information presented to us and about us are publication relation firms, image doctors, and reputation repairers. We turn to these specialists to make things right for us. (Or we turn to them to hide what we want to keep hidden.) We trust them to put our best selves forward. But what if that trust is betrayed? That broken trust is at the core of WHERE PRIVACY DIES. And remember, you’re only as safe as your encryption.

A word about the setting: Minnesota and the greater Minneapolis/St. Paul area is the backdrop. You do not have to be familiar with the region to follow the paths of the detectives. If you are familiar, you’ll recognize some geographical features, neighborhoods, and highways. Other elements are fictionalized, such as the Greater Metro Investigative Unit and its offices. What is real is the presence of water—the lakes, the Minnesota River, Minnehaha Creek, and the Mississippi River not yet mighty but gaining power as it flows through the cities. The corresponding wetlands are rich with wildlife and vast—places where a body could be lost. . .

Trust me, this will be fun.