A romance novelist and amateur sleuth’s most dangerous adventure involves her own family.
Ten years ago, E.J. Pugh discovered the Lester family, her best friends and next-door neighbors in Black Cat Ridge, Texas, massacred, with only four-year-old Bessie surviving. The Pughs took Bessie in and raised her as their own along with their son Graham and their daughter Megan, Bessie’s best friend. The police wrote the fatalities off as murder and suicide, but E.J., convinced that suicide played no role in the case, never gave up on it. Now Bessie’s everyday teen traumas are forgotten when she starts receiving e-mails from someone who says he’s her older brother Aldon, and claiming that he survived the bloodbath as well. Soon the mysterious stranger involves the whole family in trying to protect Bessie, who has already escaped one kidnapping plot. When family acquaintances start dying, E.J and her friends and family must discover the true identity of the bogus Aldon and his real agenda before Bessie becomes the next victim.
Still another look (One, Two, What Did Daddy Do?, 1992, etc.) at the Lester family murders. Lots of flashbacks, lots of changing perspectives and new viewpoints, lots of invitations to keep guessing. It all hurtles along rapidly until the unsatisfactory ending.
