A girl goes missing in a Rhode Island beach community, revealing the secrets local women have been expected to keep—from the bestselling author of The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano and Her One Regret.
July 1979: The Rhode Island beach town of Bonnet is shaken to its core when local 12-year-old Christina Grove disappears. The tight-knit community is still reeling from a series of home invasion burglaries the previous summer, and this new crime threatens to collapse the summer paradise’s whole economy.
Everyone comes out to help find her: from Bonnet royalty—like Joan Mansolillo, whose husband’s family owns the town’s beach resort—to working-class neighbors who pick up Dunkin Donuts for the search parties. Christina’s 15-year-old sister, Maddie, is riddled with guilt—was Christina out on her bike trying to find her sister the night she didn’t come home? The Groves’ next-door neighbor, twenty-one-year-old criminal justice student Diana González, works part-time at the Narragansett police department, and is immediately assigned to assist the detectives working Christina’s case. Diana knows that Bonnet’s idyllic veneer conceals an ugly underbelly: the entrenched class privilege that favors a few and traps the rest, knotting all the residents together in a web of personal vendettas and broken hearts. Everyone survives the system by keeping secrets—everyone from Maddie Grove to Joan Manzollilo. But now a little girl’s life is at stake—if the truth came out, could it save Christina Grove’s life? Or would it bring the whole community crashing down on itself?
