Stone Cold Case

A field trip ends in disaster when Morgan Iverson falls down a gulley and into a cold case. She wants to learn enough geology to keep the family rock shop in business, but suddenly the only knowledge she needs is how to survive a night in the mountains. Finding shelter, Morgan stumbles onto a Sasquatch look-alike, and worse, human remains.

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Fifteen years ago, prom queen Carlee Kruger vanished from the small Colorado town. Carlee’s mother Gerda, an alcoholic auto mechanic, asks Morgan to investigate her daughter’s death. Morgan lost her husband two years ago, and she and her adult children are finally finding healing. Morgan realizes Gerda may never recover unless she learns what happened to Carlee. When newspaper editor Kurt Willard offers to help, he seems as interested in Morgan as in the cold case.

The rock shop’s two donkeys sound the alarm when the man resembling Sasquatch lurks around their barn. The police want to question Sasquatch, but he eludes everyone. Then Morgan finds a rare fossil gemstone where she discovered Carlee’s remains – their first solid clue. Word leaks out to the prospecting community, sparking a dangerous treasure hunt. As Morgan and Kurt follow clues as convoluted as the coils on a fossilized ammonite, they suspect the person who knows what happened fifteen years ago will do anything to keep the truth buried.

In book two of the Rock Shop Mystery series, amateur sleuth Morgan Iverson digs into gemstone prospecting to solve a Stone Cold Case.

4.0
Based on 16 Reviews
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Darline A. Duncan
August 1, 2017

5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars

Good series

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Phillip Heagy
June 20, 2016

4.0 out of 5 stars Good purchase

My wife enjoyed the book very much

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Bruce Most
March 16, 2016

4.0 out of 5 stars A Gem of a Story

While I read a lot of mysteries, I’m more into hard-boiled than cozies. One of my beefs about cozies is that too many of the amateur sleuths get involved on the flimsiest of pretenses, and their hobby or job that defines the book connects only tenuously, if at all, to the story. Refreshingly, Catherine Dilts’s Rock Shop mysteries avoid these problems. In her latest, Stone Cold Case, her sleuth Morgan Iverson is fighting to keep her Rock of Ages shop afloat in a small Colorado mountain town. She’s also working hard to learn more about rocks, gems, and geology while dealing with difficult family issues—and eventually, a love interest. When Morgan stumbles (literally) on the skeleton of a young woman missing from the town for 16 years, Morgan’s growing involvement in the case (reluctantly on her part) feels organic and natural. Gemstones also figure prominently in the murder case, giving Morgan the opportunity to apply her growing knowledge to solve the crime, and the reader a chance to learn more about valuable gems. A fun read and good mystery with surprises and suspense. Bruce Most’s latest mystery is Murder on the Tracks

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catherine craig
March 7, 2016

5.0 out of 5 stars Nicely done.

I am ready for the sequel! This is a solidly written book with characters you want to walk with and befriend. The plot moves forward without a predictable outcome which keeps you reading late into the night but then putting it down because you don’t want it to end! Nicely done…and I am not usually a fan of mysteries!

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Sandy M.
January 31, 2016

4.0 out of 5 stars A good read.

Discovery of the body of a young girl, missing for 15 years, sets into motion events that endanger the insular world of this small Colorado town. A good read.

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Beth Milinski
October 1, 2015

5.0 out of 5 stars Super Mystery

Stone Cold Case is the second book in Catherine Dilts Rock Shop Mystery Series and it is fantastic. From the time I can remember I have enjoyed mystery books so this book was definitely for me! I have not read books by Catherine Dilts but now that I have, I definitely have another author to add to my must read list. I don’t usually read a book that is part of a series unless I have read the previous books but Stone Cold Case sounded too good to pass up and I am glad I didn’t pass it up. This book can definitely be read as a stand alone. Catherine Dilts does a great job making sure new readers have the details needed not to feel lost. I did not feel that the details were overdone to the point that it would bore someone who read the first book. This book had the perfect balance. This book starts a few months after the last one started with Morgan Iverson making a go of her rock shop and learning what she needs to about rocks and geology. While with a class in the forest Morgan falls into human remains and a "Bigfoot" type mountain man on the loose. Morgan dives in with her amateur sleuthing skills she finds herself getting herself into something bigger than she could imagined. Stone Cold Case is a great book! Catherine Dilts writes with authority about Colorado, geology, gems, rocks, running a business, and solving mysteries. This book grabbed a hold of me and made it very hard to put it down! I really felt like I was there as the story unfolded. Catherine Dilts kept readers guessing until the end and leaving me wanting to read more. As I stated, I did not read Catherine’s debut novel but that did not detract from my enjoyment of her book. I enjoyed the characters including Morgan’s elderly donkeys that escaped all the time. I enjoyed both the seriousness and the silliness in this novel…..I found myself laughing in lots of parts at the hi jinx Morgan found herself in. I really enjoyed this book and I think that anyone who enjoys Mystery/Suspense Fiction, you will enjoy it too! I have the first book in this series, Stone Cold Death, on my TBR pile. I cannot wait to read the next book in this series too! I give this book 5 STARS. I want to thank Catherine Dilts and Samantha Lien from Roger Charlie for this opportunity to read and review this book!

4.0 out of 5 stars Case as Cold as Stone

One of the early books I agreed to read and review for posting here on my blog was the first mystery from author Catherine Dilts. So when she approached me asking if I wanted to read Stone Cold Case, the sequel, of course, I said yes. It was just as enjoyable as I remembered the first book being. It has been almost two years since the first book came out, so I was thankful for the reminders about the characters and set up along the way. The main character in these books is Morgan Iverson, who went to Colorado to help run the family rock shop for a couple of weeks only to discover that her brother was intending to move to South America as a missionary permanently. However, once she got over the shock and began to make new friends, she started to find that life in the small town of Golden Springs might be a great place for her to start over, something she’s been struggling to do since the death of her husband. Well, except for the occasional dead body she stumbles upon. This books picks up a few months after her move. In order to learn more about stones and gems, Morgan’s been auditing a class from the local college. She’s on an end of the semester field trip up a nearby mountain when she gets separated from the rest of the class and stumbles upon a camp. Inside the makeshift shelter, she finds a skeleton being guarded by a mountain man she initially mistakes for a Sasquatch. Gossip in town is that Morgan has stumbled upon the remains of Carlee Kruger, daughter of the town’s mechanic Gerda. Carlee disappeared 16 years before and her fate has remained a mystery. Despite Morgan’s resolve to leave the investigation to the police, she keeps finding herself pulled into the mystery. Can she uncover a killer with a heart of stone? While I didn’t remember details from the first book, anything we needed to know about the characters was filled in for us. I was fully back on board very quickly and greatly enjoyed spending more time with the cast. There is a rather large cast of characters, but I was able to keep them all straight, and the growth we see, especially in Morgan, is wonderful. The mystery was interesting and compelling with many twists and turns before we reached the exciting climax. I was actually intending to stop reading for the night so I could get some other things done, but when I hit the climax, I couldn’t stop. I had to see how everything was going to work out. Unfortunately, the book seems to have one or two extra sub-plots that slow things down at times. They mainly take the focus at the beginning of the book, stealing the spotlight at times from the mystery. There’s one that was especially bad in this regard, and yet it provided some of my favorite moments for the characters. As the book nears the end, the sub-plots get resolved and the mystery really becomes the focus. Since I like the characters, I did enjoy the various sub-plots, but it would have made the book stronger if one or more had been held over for the next in the series. And with the way this book ended, I definitely want to know what happens next to these characters. That’s my only complaint with this book. Those looking for an interesting mystery will be delighted to read Stone Cold Case. The characters will draw you in and make you feel right at home before you know it. NOTE: I received an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.

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Glenda
September 17, 2015

5.0 out of 5 stars Play Detective Along With New Amateur Sleuth!

I recognize that cozy is not used these days…but there are still readers out there that don’t yet know that cozy myteries are now called "amateur sleuth mysteries." Stone Cold Case is the second in Dilts series, but each easily stands alone of course! This was certainly a fun and entertaining tale! Morgan Iverson is still pretending that she’s not interested in solving mysteries as we begin the story…but she sure does use her time and thinking in this one, especially since she found the body! Of course, it could also be because Kurt Willard who owns the local newspaper, has also taken an interest… Expect more involvement between these two, I am sure, in later novels! Morgan Iverson was unexpectedly asked to manage the Rock of Ages Shop, when her brother and his wife mysteriously too off! Morgan knew nothing about fossils and gems, and she was on a geological class tour when she found the body! Their store had a little bit of everything, including unopened geodes which a lot of students and artists loved to purchase to see what was inside…but their most valuable piece was a seventy-year-old Triceratops Horn! Everybody in town quickly began to wonder if the body was of Carlee Kruger who had vanished from town 15 years ago! Gerda, her mother, owner of the local auto mechanic shop has withdrawn from the world and has become an alcoholic who is really not pleasant to be around. Especially since she had her other daughter also leave town soon after Carlee was missing and they hadn’t seen each other since… Morgan was still learning about everything her new job entailed, but she had part-time help, Cindy, who had been helping her, as well as Del, who had worked there so long, he had now moved into the main building. Both of these characters are great to get to know, and Del, especially, has a background that keeps Morgan in suspense, wanting to know more! There are a number of different things that are happening in the story–are any or all of them related to the dead body that was found? First, there is a mountain man that was at the site where Morgan found the body. Now he was showing up at Morgan’s home site. Fortunately, their two donkeys were both just like watch dogs, and also magicians, since both had learned how to get out! Houdini had even gotten into the habit of breaking out and heading for their neighbor’s farm. Could it have anything to do with whoever was cutting the locks on their fences and then riding right into their land, and digging…maybe, prospectors? For also at the grave site, Morgan had picked up pieces of what looked to be gems, though she didn’t know what they were… When new people started dropping into the Rock of Ages, asking about what Morgan might have new, she quickly knew that word was out… Even though small particles had only been found, Del had identified it–Ammonite! He quickly urged Morgan not to tell anybody–at least until they could investigate and file a claim! Otherwise, there would be a rush of new prospectors coming into town, and it seemed that some people were already aware of it! So did that explain why various individuals from town were coming to check out what Morgan knew? They realized that the ammolite found at the burial site had clearly been brought there, just as the elephant ear plants had been. But was there ammonite in "them thear hills?!" But then seeming accidents started to happen…first Carlee’s mother, Gerda’s brakes failed…and soon so did Morgan’s… It had already been proven that both cars had been tampered with… That seemed to point to Carlee’s death as the cause for trying to get Gerda and Morgan from further investigating… There is enough complexity to the story that readers will have many potential answers to how and who had killed Carlee–her family, of course, had to be considered. But Carlee’s former fiance’ was also still in town, now married. Or was it the mountain man who had perhaps killed her accidentally and had then kept her body in the hills? Only one thing could bring this mystery out in the open… The church had planned a memorial service for Carlee, and had searched out Gerda’s other daughter and talked her into coming home. And her daughter looked just like Carlee when she had disappeared… If you enjoy playing amateur sleuth, I highly recommend you consider Stone Cold Case. It is intriguing enough to hold your attention, yet, light enough to get too deep into dangerous situations…at least it was until the climactic ending! Enjoy!

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