A BUSTLE BEST BOOK OF THE MONTH
TIME MAGAZINE SUMMER READ RECOMMEND
Finalist for the International Thriller Writers, Strand Critics, and
Barry Award for Best First Novel
"A brave, unflinching heroine and brave, unflinching writing add up to
an extraordinary debut--highly recommended."--Lee Child
A dark, compulsively readable psychological suspense debut, the first
in a new series featuring the brilliant, fearless, chaotic, and deeply
flawed Nora Watts--a character as heartbreakingly troubled, emotionally
complex, and irresistibly compelling as Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander
and Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole.
It begins with a phone call that Nora Watts has dreaded for fifteen
years--since the day she gave her newborn daughter up for adoption.
Bonnie has vanished. The police consider her a chronic runaway and
aren't looking, leaving her desperate adoptive parents to reach out to
her birth mother as a last hope.
A biracial product of the foster system, transient, homeless, scarred by
a past filled with pain and violence, Nora knows intimately what happens
to vulnerable girls on the streets. Caring despite herself, she sets out
to find Bonnie with her only companion, her mutt Whisper, knowing she
risks reopening wounds that have never really healed--and plunging into
the darkness with little to protect her but her instincts and a freakish
ability to detect truth from lies.
The search uncovers a puzzling conspiracy that leads Nora on a harrowing
journey of deception and violence, from the gloomy rain-soaked streets
of Vancouver, to the icy white mountains of the Canadian interior, to
the beautiful and dangerous island where she will face her most
terrifying demon. All to save a girl she wishes had never been born.
