Published By: Lake Union
Pages: 347
Released On: 10/10/2023
One drop of blood for a chance at a multimillion-dollar windfall. Is it a philanthropic gesture from a billionaire widow? Some suspect a darker motive behind the DNA lottery―one tied to the eighteen-year-old mystery of an infant’s unidentified remains that mars the history of idyllic Rosemary Hills, Iowa. Right after the blood lottery is announced, three local women fall under suspicion of knowing something about that night, and their carefully kept secrets threaten to spill out too.
Cleo is a divorced single mom forced to return to her hometown and accept a strange job reading to an invalid recluse; Jemma is a controversial state senator whose reelection campaign and teenage daughter have her on edge; and Alex, a divorce attorney, copes with a crumbling marriage of her own and the suffocating presence of a cold, overbearing mother.
Soon, unimaginable revelations of the past will collide with the present―and not just for Cleo, Jemma, and Alex. In this seemingly ordinary community, they aren’t the only ones with long-buried secrets.
*****
Thanks to Michelle Blankenship at Blankenship PR for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
It’s a very interesting premise which sets out to ask some interesting questions. What are we willing to sacrifice for money? What is our privacy worth? Is it possible to keep your secrets secret? Who can we trust? Do we really know our friends and our kin?
There’s no preamble to this book. We get right into it. The first few scenes set up the rest of the book and so there’s no messing about. You know what’s happened and what the repercussions of it are, and who the main players are.
In my view, you’ve got four main characters. You’ve got Edie, the billionaire widow of Johnny, and then Cleo, Jemma and Alex – three women whose link to the missing baby Ava suddenly risks being revealed. I admit, it took me a little while to get into the differing character chapters and POVs. That’s not really a view on the book itself and more to do with my issues in remembering which character’s chapter we are on. But overall I’d say they’re easy to like. There is also this interconnection between the four women that was fun to uncover.
It is full of interconnecting storylines and timelines, flitting back to their school-years and the present, which too me a bit to get my head around, but I’m not sure there would have been another way to write it in order to give the story justice.
It is a very moving book. Getting the right amount of emotion into a book to tug at your readers’ heartstrings but not feel too morbid is a difficult balance, but Ellen has managed it. It’s full of suspense, whatifs and whodunnits. It’s a psychological thriller, a mystery, and a character study.
For me, it’s more about the characters themselves and their pasts, presents and futures, rather than plot. That’s how I like my books. Character heavy.
It looks at generational issues, about breaking the repetition of negative parenting, about balancing bein a parent, a professional and being your own person, about taking secrets from your childhood through the adulthood. It really is very thought provoking. It’s full of secrets and distrust, who and what do you believe?
It’s up and down, twisty and turny, with surprises at every corner. It doesn’t matter what I thought was going to happen, the story went in direction I did not predict. It has many layers to it, and yet it’s easy to follow, understand and appreciate, and suggests a promising career for this debut author.
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