Part of Cyrus Haven
First published 2019
A girl is pulled from a secret room after a violent crime. She is half-starved, filthy, and silent about everything that matters: her name, her age, where she came from. No missing persons file matches her. No DNA leads anywhere. Six years pass. She is living in a secure children's home now, going by Evie Cormac, a name that was given rather than inherited. When Evie files a court case demanding release as an adult, forensic psychologist Cyrus Haven is assigned to assess her. He has never encountered anyone quite like her. She can tell when people are lying, and nearly everyone around her is. At the same time, Cyrus is pulled into a separate investigation. Jodie Sheehan, a high school figure-skating champion, has been found murdered on a footpath near her home. Everyone describes Jodie as wholesome and well-liked, but the closer Cyrus looks, the more that picture cracks. Evie, the girl with no history, turns out to know something about Jodie's hidden life. Cyrus is carrying his own grief. He moves between a girl who needs someone to fight for her freedom and a dead girl whose story has not yet been told honestly. Both cases ask the same thing of him: how much is the truth worth?
Genres: mystery, crime, contemporary, adult-fiction, thriller, psychological-thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, emotionally-intense, gritty, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: damaged-protagonist, dual-timeline, mystery-within-mystery, unreliable-narrator
Setting: children's home, footpath
Period: contemporary, 21st-century
353 pages · Hardcover · Scribner
Content warnings: abuse, child-abuse, murder, violence