Good Ones

Nicola Bennett last saw her childhood friend Lauren Ballard dragging a key along the side of a brand-new cherry-red Chevy Silverado. The next night Lauren vanished from her home, leaving behind a bloodstained washcloth, signs of a struggle, a grieving husband and a young daughter.

Nearly twenty years later, Nicola is out of work and still haunted by what happened. She returns to her Appalachian hometown in Tyndall County, a small Blue Ridge community that feels frozen in time to her and reminds her of Lauren at every turn. Strangely, the friends and neighbors she grew up with all seem to have moved on. Nicola cannot. She is drawn to stories of missing girls and searches the internet obsessively for any clue to what became of Lauren. To get closer to the answers, she takes a job in town, convinced that the truth lies somewhere in the hollows and valleys of the county.

This is a work of literary suspense with a Southern Gothic feel. It looks at the push and pull of female friendship in adolescence, the pressure in small towns to conform, the cost of being "good" when the rules for women begin to chafe, and the way true crime fans can blur empathy with voyeurism. As secrets surface and the truth starts to unravel, Nicola must face whether she can finally break free of the past or lose herself to the unanswered questions of her youth.