The beginning of a novel, with all the scene-setting, is often hard to get into, but Matt Goldman does a great job of getting the reader immediately engaged. His pacing is good with varied sentence structure, and humor mixed in at the right times. Some great description such as "She’d had [her hair] cut short. Not cute short but surrender short." Nothing has happened yet in this excerpt -- I'd read this just for characters and family relationships, but I'm interested in how the mystery plot develops.