Ashes to Ashes

Ashes to Ashes is a crime novel by the American writer Tami Hoag, published in 1999 and the first of her books about the Kovac and Liska team.

The victims are women working in the sex trade, and the case has gone nowhere until the death of a woman who does not belong to that world gives it a press profile. Kate Conlan left the Bureau and now works with witnesses, and she is the person who has to persuade the teenager who says he saw the burning to tell anybody official. John Quinn is the profiler sent to the city, and the book follows the two of them as the investigation becomes a media event and as the possibility emerges that the wrong man is being looked at. Hoag writes the procedures and the politics, and she is careful with the victims, who are described as people rather than as set dressing.

It introduced a pair of investigators the author returned to in later novels about the same city and the same police department.