Marsh Queen

For fans of Where the Crawdads Sing, this marvelous debut (Alice McDermott, National Book Awardwinning author of The Ninth Hour) follows a Washington, DC, artist as she faces her past and the secrets held in the waters of Floridas lush swamps and wetlands. Loni Murrow is an accomplished bird artist at the Smithsonian who loves her job. But when she receives a call from her younger brother summoning her back home to help their obstinate mother recover after an accident, Lonis neat, contained life in Washington, DC, is thrown into chaos, and she finds herself exactly where she does not want to be. Going through her mothers things, Loni uncovers scraps and snippets of a time in her life she would prefer to forgeta childhood marked by her father Boyds death by drowning. When Loni comes across a single, cryptic note from a strangerThere are some things I have to tell you about Boyds deathshe begins a dangerous quest to discover the truth, all the while struggling to reconnect with her mother and reconcile with her brother and his wife. To make matters worse, she meets a man whose attractive simple charm threatens to pull her back towards everything shes worked to escape. Torn between worldsher professional accomplishments in Washington, and the small town of her childhoodLoni must decide whether to delve beneath the surface into murky half-truths and avenge the past or bury it, once and for all. Fans of Delia Owens and Lauren Groff will find this a wonderful and absorbing read (Suzanne Feldman, author of Sisters of the Great War).