WHAT YOU NEVER KNEW

When a young woman rediscovers her family’s summer home, it raises uncomfortable questions about the disappearance of her father years earlier.

Waiting in a lawyer’s office to deal with her mother's estate seven months after her death from lung cancer, May has no idea that this will be her own final hour. Her death in a car crash leaves her younger sister, June, alone in the world, sorely missing the sister who gave her the warmth their own mother could never muster. June is surprised when the deaths of her mother and sister leave her in possession of the family home on Avril Island in Lake Champlain. After a trauma on the island some years before, May had sworn never to return, but interspersed chapters in the warning voice of May’s ghost don’t keep June from revisiting the summer place. Once on the island, June is held by more than her strong sense of nostalgia. Ezra Keen, the all-grown-up son of the island’s caretaker, has taken over the maintenance of the house, and seeing him brings back June’s memories of their first kiss many years before. But not all her childhood memories of Avril Island are so good. June starts to remember things about the island that seem related to her father’s disappearance their final summer there, and some of the connections seem to relate to the days-later disappearance of West Keen, Ezra’s father. Sinister events in the present point to someone threatening June, bringing her and Ezra closer together until their long-buried family histories endanger their renewed bond.

Light and easy writing brightens the characters’ traumas in this debut novel.