About the Book
A woman’s trip home reveals frightening truths in a twisty novel of murder and family secrets by the New York Times bestselling author of And Now She’s Gone and These Toxic Things.
TV writer Yara Gibson’s hometown of Palmdale, California, isn’t her first choice for a vacation. But she’s back to host her parents’ twentieth-anniversary party and find the perfect family mementos for the celebration. Everything is going to plan until Yara receives a disturbing text: I have information that will change your life.
The message is from Felicia Campbell, who claims to be a childhood friend of Yara’s mother. But they’ve been estranged for years—drama best ignored and forgotten. But Yara can’t forget Felicia, who keeps texting, insisting that Yara talk to her “before it’s too late.”
But the next day is already too late for Felicia, whose body is found floating in Lake Palmdale. Before she died, Felicia left Yara a key to a remote lakeside cabin. In the basement are files related to a mysterious tragedy, unsolved since 1998. What secrets was Felicia hiding? How much of what Yara knows about her family has been true?
The deeper Yara digs for answers, the more she fears that Felicia was right. Uncovering the truth about what happened at the cabin all those years ago will change Yara’s life—or end it.
My Review
Now. I have read some twisty thrillers in my time, but this – this one really takes the cake on extreme family dysfunction and jaw dropping plot twists that had me grimacing and trying to shield my eyes while still reading. Yara is an immediately likeable heroine that seems trapped in a horror movie, each chapter slowly peeling back yet another part of the mystery surrounding Yara’s hometown of Palmdale, her family’s secrets, and multiple unsolved murders. While Yara struggles to feel safe in her own childhood home, she also desperately wants to figure out the past and why it appears to be haunting only her. There are a lot of layers to this story outside of the domestic thriller portion – racism, the bond of sisterhood, mental health disorders and more. While there were times I had to put the Kindle down because I was more than a little disturbed at the storyline, I always had to pick it back up after a break and see what was going to be uncovered – a new secret or another body? There were a couple holes in the plot that stuck out to me, but otherwise this is a fast-paced, not for the weak thriller that will keep you up at night.
4 stars
