William Morrow
May 2016
On Sale: May 3, 2016
Featuring: Luisa "Lu" Brant
368 pages ISBN: 0062083457 EAN: 9780062083456 Kindle: B014PNZB74 Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
The New York Times bestselling author of the
acclaimed standalones After I’m Gone, I’d Know You
Anywhere, and What the Dead Know, challenges
our notions of memory, loyalty, responsibility, and justice
in this evocative and psychologically complex story about a
long-ago death that still haunts a family.
Luisa “Lu” Brant is the newly elected—and first
female—state’s attorney of Howard County, Maryland, a job in
which her widower father famously served. Fiercely
intelligent and ambitious, she sees an opportunity to make
her name by trying a mentally disturbed drifter accused of
beating a woman to death in her home. It’s not the kind of
case that makes headlines, but peaceful Howard county
doesn’t see many homicides.
As Lu prepares for the trial, the case dredges up painful
memories, reminding her small but tight-knit family of the
night when her brother, AJ, saved his best friend at the
cost of another man’s life. Only eighteen, AJ was cleared by
a grand jury. Now, Lu wonders if the events of 1980 happened
as she remembers them. What details might have been withheld
from her when she was a child?
The more she learns about the case, the more questions
arise. What does it mean to be a man or woman of one’s
times? Why do we ask our heroes of the past to conform to
the present’s standards? Is that fair? Is it right?
Propelled into the past, she discovers that the legal
system, the bedrock of her entire life, does not have all
the answers. Lu realizes that even if she could learn the
whole truth, she probably wouldn’t want to.