A single lie becomes a defining moment in a family’s life in an unforgettable novel of psychological suspense.

After being gone for two decades, Maddy’s half-sister, Emily, is back in town to settle their late father’s estate. Emily’s not the troubled girl Maddy remembers from their volatile childhood. Apparently, all is well. It can’t possibly matter anymore that Maddy married Emily’s first love, but the pictures Maddy finds on her husband’s phone tell a different story. Suspicions of an affair are hard to ignore.

Then again, Maddy hasn’t been herself lately. She’s increasingly confused. She’s losing items that are precious to her. She forgets where she’s going. The line between what’s real and unreal has become a blur. Even the damning photos have disappeared. Though her state of mind starts to become everyone’s cause for concern, Maddy refuses to believe she’s losing her grip on reality. But the one thing she can’t deny is the secret from the past that rewrote all their lives—a secret that’s ready to come out.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

Maddy’s school reports often said, “Talks too much.” Her mom defended the trait as inquisitive. Her dad didn’t say much about it, but she could tell he wasn’t a fan of her endless questions. She’d never realized that talking could have landed her in this much trouble. Perhaps this was why everyone had been trying to get her to shut up her whole life.

Maddy looked around the waiting room, every last person with their head bent to their phone. There were no tattered magazines gracing the various chairs and tables of the room. No one wanted to read secondhand copies of People magazine anymore when they had their phone to gaze at, loaded with personalized content just for them. Maddy sometimes visualized people’s phones swapped out for mirrors, a whole world of people staring in silent awe at digitized versions of themselves.

He made it sound so easy. Find some sperm. As if by looking in enough of Joseph’s creases and crevices they’d dredge some up from somewhere.

“You could both be charged with statutory rape,” said Ivan, looking entirely serious about the whole thing, even though the notion that they were both simultaneously busy raping each other at the same time was clearly ridiculous.

My Review:

This book was heaving with unreliable, treacherous, untrustworthy, selfish, and horrifyingly fractured characters. I despised them all by the last page, yet I was undeniably hooked and invested in unraveling their heinous schemes. I devised multiple theories of gaslighting, mental illness, revenge, retribution, rage, hatred, betrayal, and abuse, but who was guilty? The community was apparently a viper’s nest of vile and self-serving individuals, which in reality, under the surface, every community is similarly populated.

The writing and storylines were original, sneakily witty, compelling, and perceptively detailed from multiple points of view. I was engrossed, annoyed, and biting my cuticles from the tension brewing from the petty, destructive, and deplorable manner the characters treated each other. They were all guilty of something, so what is wrong with me that I voyeuristically needed to know exactly what?