This is book 19 of the "Kinsey Milhone" series.

This note contains spoilers for the book.

Except we all know S Is For Space.

A cold case, a 34-year-old disappearance, which turns out to be a murder, and gets solved. Kinsey has to kill the killer in self-defense (and it's a darned good thing she bothered to get her gun this time; I think Archie Goodwin's rule on this is a minimum), the altnerative being buried with her car the way Violet was.

Most of the story is character studies of people in small-town California, and how the bad boy is a lawyer and his cousin is a doctor and so forth. And the obvious bad guy, husband of the deceased, known to beat her, was a drunkard, is of course clearly innocent, even if he does fall off the wagon when he hear's she's been found.