The third book in the Keel series begins with Steven Keel back in Flagstaff, Arizona after graduating from the police academy in Phoenix. Although he’s a notice detective, his humility and friendly ways have aided him with people so his boss has saved a new case for him that requires those traits. The complainant is an obnoxious astronomy researcher from the local observatory who insists that her assistant is a missing person. But her other co-workers think he has run away to escape from her demands. She offers no explanation for her certainty until Keel agrees to keep what she tells him off the record. Although it’s against police policy, he agrees and in the privacy of a Faraday cage, she tells him that international espionage may be involved. What follows is his attempt to get at the truth while his boss, who doesn’t know what she has revealed, is expecting him to drop the case.
Feeling out of his league in the field of astronomy, he is tutored by the researcher and then pointed in a direction that frustrates him at every turn. On the verge of giving up, he gets new information that gives credence to the case and leads him down a life-threatening trail.
Constant Keel is a story about diligence in the face of uncertainty as he relies on character traits instilled in him as a child and the like-mindedness of his fellow detectives, who pull out all the stops to help him. He may not be the world’s greatest detective but by either serendipity or God’s intervention, he stumbles closer to the truth and ultimately solves the case.