First published 2018
Joe O'Loughlin has always known his parents as a love story. William, a celebrated surgeon, and Mary, his devoted wife, have been together since childhood. Sixty years of marriage. A fixed point in Joe's world. Then the hospital calls. William has been beaten badly. Joe arrives to find a woman he has never seen before sitting at his father's bedside, covered in William's blood, weeping. She is not family. She is not explained. The police tell Joe to step back and let them work. He ignores them. He starts pulling at threads, and the fabric of everything he thought he knew begins to come apart. His father kept secrets. Deep ones. The man who raised Joe with a clear sense of right and wrong turns out to have lived in moral grey areas Joe never suspected. The woman at the bedside is the center of it all. Was she trying to save William? Was she the one who hurt him? Does she have a claim on him that Joe's family never knew about? The investigation costs Joe more than he expects. Some truths protect the people who find them. Others do the opposite.
Genres: drama, mystery, crime, adult-fiction, thriller, psychological-thriller
Vibes: dark, emotionally-complex, intimate, morally-ambiguous, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: family-mystery, investigation-driven-plot, secrets-revealed, unreliable-truth
384 pages · Paperback · Hachette Australia
Content warnings: death, violence