First published 2014
Lucy Brighton creates comic strips and children's cartoons from her childhood home in New Jersey. Her parents moved to Florida five years earlier, leaving behind years of cold distance between them. When a phone call brings news that her parents died in a car crash, Lucy travels south to handle their estate. She expects paperwork and familiar belongings. Instead, she finds a hidden safe containing fake passports, stacks of cash, and weapons. The discovery forces Lucy to confront an impossible question: who were her parents really? As she digs deeper into their secret lives, every assumption about her family crumbles. The people who raised her may have been strangers. The revelations threaten not only her understanding of the past but her sense of who she is. Lucy must piece together a puzzle that spans decades, knowing the truth will change everything she believed about her parents and herself.
Genres: suspense, mystery, contemporary, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: deception, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Florida, New Jersey
Period: 21st-century
351 pages · Kindle Edition · Zebra Books