The Mortician's Daughter

"Ginny Lavoie's life is in shambles. Evicted from her apartment, suspended by the NYPD, betrayed by her lover, the disgraced cop thinks she can't sink any lower. Then she gets an urgent late-night phone call with two awful words: "Danny's dead."" "That message - a plea from her childhood best friend to solve the murder of her handsome, popular teenage son - now brings Ginny back to the scruffy New England mill town she left more than a decade before. Yet as she tries to untangle the secrets and lies simmering beneath the surface of an insular community whose residents mark time in generations, she finds that the town is no longer as she left it." "Artists are turning empty mills into fancy lofts, old diners are being replaced by trendy coffeehouses - and the town's first homicide in recent memory soon gives way to a second, then a third. Having sworn to find Danny's murderer, Ginny must face both childhood ghosts and new demons. As she looks for answers, she sifts through suspects ranging from the town's resident homeless Vietnam vet to Manhattan hipsters to Danny's own step-father. But the attempts on her life aren't the most frightening part of Ginny's homecoming. No, that's dealing with the boy she left behind: her high-school sweetheart, a man who was content to spend his life in the small town she couldn't wait to leave." "Now as Ginny struggles to uncover the truth, this outsider must finally confront her own dark past - and a ruthless killer who may be much closer than she suspects."--BOOK JACKET.

Elizabeth Bloom is the author of the highly praised See Isabelle Run, and a journalist, playwright, and film critic who has worked for a variety of publications. An associate editor at the Cornell University alumni magazine, she lives in Ithaca, New York, with her dogs, Nancy Drew and Mr. Jane Austen.