Excerpt from Tell Me Everything by Erika Krouse, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I kept trying. In winter, he assigned me a medical malpractice case, featuring a maternal death. Grayson was again vague, instructing me to "find something on them." I visited the hospital and pretended I was pregnant—no pillow under the shirt, just a big burrito for lunch. I told a nurse, "I may be high-risk. Do pregnant women ever die here?" The nurse extracted me from the group and escorted me to a lilac-smelling charge nurse in pink paisley scrubs who said, "I think another hospital may better suit your needs."

Grayson assigned me to a car accident, another personal injury case. A state trooper showed me accident scene photos, but I couldn't decipher them. "What's that smudge here?" I asked. "Tire tracks," he said. "And this?" "Blood." "And this bump here, where's that?" "That's the median." I pretended to stare hard, to see something that meant anything to me. In my report for Grayson, it was difficult to disguise the fact that I had nothing to say.

Grayson frowned and said, "I don't think I'm making good use of your skill set."

What skill set? I knew my methods were wrong, but I didn't know what the right ones were. I had read enough detective fiction to know a good PI doesn't just find out what happened; she makes things happen. Or he does. Maybe the problem was that I was a woman. If I were a gearhead man, maybe the accident photos would have made sense. If I were a cute man, some woman might have talked to me when I held up the sign at the women's triathlon.

I didn't even have a PI license. Colorado, ever a cowboy state, didn't require licenses for marriages, psychotherapy practices, or private investigators. But every private investigator in every novel I had ever read was an ex-something—an ex-cop, an ex-lawyer, an ex-con. I was an ex-dishwasher, an ex–instructor of poetry. I had also previously worked as an ice cream truck driver, a waitress, an accountant, a shoe saleswoman, a house cleaner, a canvasser, a school bus monitor, a hospital aide, an after-school elementary teacher, a creative writing instructor at the university in town, a pizza cook and delivery person, a security guard, an administrative assistant, a piano player at weddings and funerals, a telemarketer, a data-entry drone, a B&B night manager, a tarot card reader on the street, a cafeteria worker, and a writer of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, technical manuals, marketing materials, book reviews, and even horoscopes for a fashion magazine, all without proper qualifications or any particular talent. But I couldn't seem to pull off this PI job. I had never exactly been a wunderkind, but I had never failed at anything so spectacularly before. I wondered which would disappoint Grayson more—if I quit, or rode this job until the wheels fell off and the poor guy was forced to fire me.

Despite my nonperformance, Grayson was still paying me by the hour, which made me feel bad until he called me into his office. I had been working for him less than six months, and I dreaded the meeting. This job had ended before it had really begun.

Our meeting was postponed because of the weather. Following a season of Chinook winds clocking up to eighty-five miles per hour, the drought temporarily paused with a record-breaking three-day spring blizzard. An upslope snowstorm dumped three and a half feet of snow on the flats and foothills, and between seven and eleven feet in the mountains that crowded our small city. Wind pushed drifts against doors, garages, Dumpsters, or any still structure. All the powder in the air completely obscured the mountains that defined the western perimeter of the city. We might be in any flat place—Nebraska, Kansas. Except for gusts, the city was silent. Cars hulked like sleeping animals, houses wore marshmallow caps, and the roads turned to cold, white silk.

It took four days for the city to clear the sidewalks downtown near Grayson's office, and I had to walk there because my street was still unplowed. Commuters cross-country skied to work even on main artery streets. Few cars drove the roads, but every now and then an SUV towed a whooping skier behind it on a long bungee cord. Walls of melting snow flanked my path so high it felt like I was traversing a maze. With the mountains obscured, everything was strange again, which would have been exciting if I hadn't been about to get canned.

Excerpted from Tell Me Everything by Erika Krouse. Copyright © 2022 by Erika Krouse. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.