Her Father's Secret by Sara Blaedel

I read The Undertaker's Daughter by Sara Blaedel last year and liked it.  

Unlike her Louise Ricks series, Blaedel has set her Ilka Jensen series in Racine, Wisconsin instead of Denmark .  When Ilka was about seven, her father abandoned his family in Denmark and moved to the U.S. where he started a new family.  Ilka never came to terms with the desertion of her beloved father.

When he died, Paul Jensen left his funeral home to Ilka, and she flew to Racine to finalize the estate and maybe find out more about her father.  The first book details her meeting with her father's new family (who reject her) and the problems concerning the sale of the funeral home. Oh, and a disappearing corpse and a decade old murder.

In Her Father's Secret, Ilka  continues to face difficulties involving selling the funeral home.  Worse, there is so little money available that even getting through pre-paid funerals is a challenge.  Ilka has found blackmail letters to her father from a woman named Maggie; someone is following Ilka; a feud between two wealthy and influential men becomes more threatening; Ilka's half-sister is seriously injured and her horses stolen; a woman is killed in a home invasion; and a boatload of uncomfortable and dangerous family secrets make this book much more suspenseful than the first book.  

A couple of unexpected twists at the end make me eager to read the next book.

NetGalley/Grand Central Publishing
Mystery/Suspense.  Mar. 5, 2019.  Print version: 320 pages.