โRemember what your name means. Iโm so sorry.โ
Just two weeks before her final architecture exams, Sloane Connolly receives this cryptic handwritten note from her estranged mother. When her calls go unanswered, Sloane returns to her hometown in northwest Massachusetts to discover that her mother has vanished. A thorough search turns up no trace of herโand the police are ultimately forced to give up and rule her disappearance a suicide.
As Sloane deals with the aftermath, she distracts herself by taking on a mysterious commission: to design a memorial for six strangers whose connection to her anonymous clientโknown to her only as The Employerโis deliberately kept in the dark. To complete this project, Sloane must trace the lives of all six individuals and uncover the hidden links between them. With the promise of a multimillion-dollar payday and a prestigious jump start to her career, itโs an opportunity too important to pass up.
But as the trail pulls her from Maine to Miami, Sloane begins to realize that the memorial is far more than just an academic exercise. The secrets she uncovers begin to weave dangerously into her own familyโs tragic history, forcing her to question everything she thought she knewโand to discover for herself just how far sheโs willing to go to survive.
John Katzenbach is the New York Times bestselling author of such novels as the Edgar Awardโnominated In the Heat of the Summer, which was adapted for the screen as The Mean Season; The Traveler; Day of Reckoning; Just Cause and Hartโs War, which were also made into movies; The Shadow Man, another Edgar nominee; State of Mind; The Analyst; and The Madmanโs Tale. Katzenbach has been a criminal court reporter for the Miami Herald and Miami News and a featured writer for the Heraldโs Tropic magazine. He lives in Western Massachusetts.