Description: A girl goes missing in a Rhode Island beach community, revealing the secrets local women have been expected to keep--from the bestselling author of The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano and Her One Regret.
July 1979: The Rhode Island beach town of Bonnet is shaken to its core when local 12-year-old Christina Grove disappears. The tight-knit community is still reeling from a series of home invasion burglaries the previous summer, and this new crime threatens to collapse the summer paradise's whole economy. Everyone comes out to help find her: from Bonnet royalty--like Joan Mancini, whose husband's family owns the town's beach resort--to working-class neighbors who pick up Dunkin Donuts for the search parties. Christina's 15-year-old sister, Maddie, is riddled with guilt--was Christina out on her bike trying to find her sister the night she didn't come home? The Groves' next-door neighbor, twenty-one-year-old criminal justice student Diana González, works part-time at the Narragansett police department, and is immediately assigned to assist the detectives working Christina's case. Diana knows that Bonnet's idyllic veneer conceals an ugly underbelly: the entrenched class privilege that favors a few and traps the rest, knotting all the residents together in a web of personal vendettas and broken hearts. Everyone survives the system by keeping secrets--everyone from Maddie Grove to Joan Mancini. But now a little girl's life is at stake--if the truth came out, could it save Christina Grove's life? Or would it bring the whole community crashing down on itself?Review Quotes: Praise for Donna Freitas
"Freitas addresses a topic little discussed in fiction--that of regretting motherhood--with compassion, demonstrating the consequences of her characters' choices while also delivering a fingernails-bitten-to-the-quick mystery."--Sarah Weinman, The New York Times "This book manages to be simultaneously a page-turning crime thriller and a deep exploration of one of the ultimate mothering taboos--regret. Absolutely extraordinary."
--Emily Oster, bestselling author of Expecting Better "Donna Freitas proves she can 'say the unsayable' and weave thorny, important questions about women's lives into a compelling, entertaining, and provocative suspense novel."
--Andromeda Romano-Lax, author of The Deepest Lake "This gripping, character-driven thriller kept me reading late into the night."
--Julia Bartz, New York Times bestselling author of The Writing Retreat
"Engaging. And thought-provoking. I could not put it down. This book is brilliant, subversive, enjoyable, and deeply revelatory about the inner lives of women and mothers."
--Lyz Lenz, author of This American Ex-Wife "Smart, addictive, utterly compelling and shockingly honest--a page turner with a deep, emotional core. So many brilliant observations about women's lives--this book made me feel so seen, while it kept me guessing."
--Daisy Buchanan, author of Insatiable