Ava Hope Saunders, six months after the death of her adopted mother Claire, is still searching for the identity of her birth mother. The story she's been told, of being found wrapped in a blanket in a Philadelphia church when she was less than two months old, doesn't match memories of some very frightening events, when she was a toddler, or of a mother who wasn't Claire.
She takes a picture she's found in her mother's things, of a house, and visits it. It's unoccupied at present, but a neighbor tells her there was a terrible murder there five years ago, of the couple who lived there, by an apparent intruder. The murder was never solved.
Do the dead couple have some connection to her? She recruits her best friend, Joanne, a paralegal at the courthouse where she works as a translator, and Russ, a Camden police officer assigned to the prosecutor's office at the courthouse, to help her investigate.
The investigation quickly gets complicated, confusing, and frightening.
The husband of the murdered couple was a childhood friend of Claire's father, Ross Saunders. Ross's own death, though originally ruled an accident--an apparent fall getting out of the tub--has some odd, not to say suspicious, aspects. Another of the friends, Fr. Bill Connolly, also died suddenly and oddly, from an allergic reaction to an allergen he wouldn't likely have had in the house, with his Epipen found not far away, underneath the bed.
When another death happens, and Ava disappears, Joanne and Russ are very, very worried, and they don't know the half of what they should be worried about.
This is an intricate story, with characters who aren't what they seem at first, both good and bad. It's a little grimmer than I expected, but I couldn't stop listening.
Recommended.
I bought this audiobook.
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