First published 2006
Angela Toussaint spent the summer of 2001 in her grandmother Marie's old house in Sacajawea, Washington, hoping the family's legendary healing gifts would save her crumbling marriage. Instead, she left with a shattered family and a grief she spent two years trying to outrun. Now she is back, and the town has not been idle. Neighbors have suffered losses that mirror her own in ways that feel less like coincidence and more like pattern. Angela starts pulling at threads. Her grandmother once confronted something in 1929, something that did not go away so much as go quiet. Angela's teenage son Corey may have stirred it back to life. With her old boyfriend Myles Fisher at her side and whatever her grandmother left behind as a guide, Angela works to connect the deaths across decades. The deeper she goes, the clearer it becomes that this entity has always had its eye on her family specifically, and that she may carry something inside herself capable of fighting back. The book is a race between Angela finding that power and the darkness finding her first.
Genres: fiction, american-fiction, horror, supernatural, adult, adult-fiction
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, emotional, haunting, mysterious, suspenseful
Tropes: ancestral-power, found-family, race-against-time, second-chance
Setting: Sacajawea, Washington
Period: 1929, 2001, 21st-century
597 pages · Paperback · Simon & Schuster
Content warnings: death