How Loyalty and Power Create the Perfect Cover for a Killer

There’s a certain comfort in trusting the people who hold authority.

The local police chief. The community leader. The familiar neighbour who’s always first to help when a storm knocks the power out. We like to believe that people in these positions are exactly who they claim to be.

But that same trust can be the perfect shield for someone who’s anything but trustworthy.

In Cold Mercy, I wanted to explore how misplaced trust and corrupt authority feed each other creating a system where the guilty can move freely, even in plain sight.

Small communities are built on loyalty. In the best cases, that loyalty holds people together through hardship. In the worst, it becomes a wall that keeps outsiders — and sometimes the truth — from getting in. When someone with power is on the inside of that wall, they can shape the narrative, control the investigation, and silence suspicion before it even forms.

This dynamic creates one of the most chilling setups in crime fiction: a predator not just hiding within a community, but leading it.

• They know how the system works.
• They know where the blind spots are.
• They can point the finger anywhere they choose, often at the most convenient scapegoat.

It’s an arrangement that works… until someone from outside steps in.

That’s where my detective, Avril Dahl, comes in. She’s not from here. She doesn’t have the same history with these people, the same emotional investments. She doesn’t know which families are “untouchable” or whose name carries weight. That gives her a freedom the locals don’t have — but it also paints a target on her back.

Because when you start pulling at the threads that connect loyalty and power, you’re not just exposing an individual crime. You’re threatening an entire system that depends on everyone playing their part — looking the other way, trusting the wrong person, and letting the mask stay firmly in place.

In Cold Mercy, the third book in my bestselling Avril Dahl series, those threads unravel in the middle of a snowstorm, in a town cut off from the outside world. It’s a setting that amplifies the theme: isolation, loyalty, and authority creating the perfect incubator for danger. And when that danger finally shows its true face, the betrayal cuts deeper than the cold ever could.

That’s the heart of this story: the collision of trust and power, and the damage done when both fall into the wrong hands.