Before She Was Helen

by Caroline B. Cooney

First published 2020

Clemmie walks next door to check on Dom, her unpleasant neighbor. He's gone, but she discovers something extraordinary and beautiful in his house. She snaps a photo with her phone and forwards it without thinking. The image spreads across the internet while Clemmie panics about her network of secrets. She has spent fifty years hiding under false names. One thoughtless picture could destroy everything she has built. The object she photographed turns out to be art, but police find a corpse in the same location where Clemmie left her fingerprints. She wasn't supposed to be there. Her quiet existence in a sleepy South Carolina retirement community falls apart as decades of carefully buried history come flooding back. Clemmie must confront the dark truth she has been running from her entire adult life.

Genres: suspense, mystery, crime, contemporary

Vibes: dark, emotional, intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking

Tropes: deception, unreliable-narrator

Setting: South Carolina

Period: 20th-century, 21st-century

336 pages · Hardcover · Poisoned Pen Press

Content warnings: mental-illness

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