For fans of Where the Crawdads Sing, this âmarvelous debutâ (Alice McDermott, National Book Awardâwinning author of The Ninth Hour) follows a Washington, DC, artist as she faces her past and the secrets held in the waters of Floridaâs lush swamps and wetlands.
Loni Murrow is an accomplished bird artist at the Smithsonian who loves her job. But when she receives a call from her younger brother summoning her back home to help their obstinate mother recover after an accident, Loniâs neat, contained life in Washington, DC, is thrown into chaos, and she finds herself exactly where she does not want to be.
Going through her motherâs things, Loni uncovers scraps and snippets of a time in her life she would prefer to forgetâa childhood marked by her father Boydâs death by drowning. When Loni comes across a single, cryptic note from a strangerââThere are some things I have to tell you about Boydâs deathââshe begins a dangerous quest to discover the truth, all the while struggling to reconnect with her mother and reconcile with her brother and his wife. To make matters worse, she meets a man whose attractive simple charm threatens to pull her back towards everything sheâs worked to escape.
Torn between worldsâher professional accomplishments in Washington, and the small town of her childhoodâLoni must decide whether to delve beneath the surface into murky half-truths and avenge the past or bury it, once and for all. âFans of Delia Owens and Lauren Groff will find this a wonderful and absorbing readâ (Suzanne Feldman, author of Sisters of the Great War).