Caroline Friday is twenty-one years old in December 1989 and lives with her family in Pittsburgh’s North Hills. She comes from a relatively comfortable upbringing, but she is broke, directionless, and determined to prove that she can build a life without relying on her father or the expanding family restaurant business.
Two years out of high school, she has rejected college, resisted every comfortable opportunity offered to her, and dreams of earning enough money to buy a battered car and move into an apartment of her own.
Caroline is slim, wiry, tattooed, and deliberately unpolished. She wears oversized flannel shirts, faded black jeans, layered wooden-bead necklaces, a small silver nose hoop, and scuffed combat boots. Her shoulder-length dark-brown hair is choppy and unruly, with several irregular home-dyed purple strands. A thorned-rose tattoo marks her left inner forearm, while a small black swallow appears on her right upper arm.
Rambunctious, impulsive, assertive, and fiercely independent, Caroline possesses a profane sense of humor and a natural resistance to intimidation. She is intelligent enough to recognize her own mistakes but too proud to tolerate humiliation. Her anger often sabotages her immediate interests, as demonstrated when she spectacularly quits her job at Burger Empire after throwing her employer’s burning hamburgers into a bucket of filthy mop water.
Beneath Caroline’s bad attitude is a loyal, perceptive, and unexpectedly heroic young woman who is terrified that her life may never truly begin. She is the younger sister of Sam Friday and has grown up around Sam’s best friend, Hank Raglan. Hank views her as a younger sister, while Caroline harbors feelings for him that he does not recognize. When she begins investigating the unsolved murders of Lawrence and Darlene Bingham, Caroline discovers connections leading toward Unalco and realizes that Hank may be in grave danger. What begins as restless curiosity becomes a defining mission, drawing Caroline out of her aimless youth and toward her place as one of the central heroes of The Midas Files.
