Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite

Josh Lowder’s The Cornerstone follows Brian Howard, a Brookhaven detective called to the Reveldome Museum after night guard Abdel “Abe” Ayman is found strangled inside its American Revolution exhibit. Assistant curator Amber Grant saw a masked intruder standing over Abe’s body, yet the attacker disappears from the locked building, and no exit alarm sounds. Nothing appears to be missing, leaving Brian with a crime scene that makes little sense. His search turns to a grandfather clock connected to George Washington after a symbol surfaces alongside clues in old records. As Brian follows the trail beyond South Louisiana, a threatening message suggests someone knows more about him than the case should reveal. With Amber using her historical expertise beside him, Brian must determine what the intruder came to find as the people protecting that secret close in.

Josh Lowder’s The Cornerstone is an outstanding historical crime thriller. Lowder keeps his fast-paced mystery fully loaded with a bevy of intense scenes, like slipping into a Washington historical society after dark and racing through the city when discovered. That danger adds to fleshing out Brian, whose detective instincts work beautifully with his fascination for American history, especially when an old letter sends the investigation into another piece of Washington’s past. I love Amber Grant, a fiercely intelligent woman who has no problem putting her own historical expertise to work beside the police. It takes these types of investigators to follow a mystery built around people determined to protect an old secret. As the search moves beyond Brookhaven, Lowder turns those settings into assets, from archival rooms holding handwritten clues to South Louisiana beneath Hurricane Sammi, where heavy wind batters a surveillance drone above a storage facility. Well written and entertaining, readers who enjoy historical mysteries mixed with police thrills will adore this.