Whidbey

Birdie Chang picked Whidbey Island without knowing a thing about it. All that mattered was that it lay about as far from her life as she could get. She is running from the headlines at home, from the worried look in her girlfriend's eyes, and above all from Calvin Boyer, who abused her when she was a child and has now resurfaced. On the ferry, a stranger approaches her with a proposition: a sinister answer to her problem, and a plan for revenge.

Birdie is not the only girl Calvin hurt. Linzie King, a former reality TV star, wrote about her own experience of him in a bestselling memoir. The two women have never met, yet their stories are tied together. Once Birdie is settled on the island, she finally opens the book and finds far too much in it that she recognizes. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Calvin's devoted mother, Mary-Beth, gets a phone call from the police telling her that her only son has been murdered.

Calvin's death starts a chain of events that sends each of the three women searching for answers. The novel is a whodunnit told from alternating points of view. It looks at how far the effects of violence reach and at the flaws in our systems of incarceration and rehabilitation. This debut also asks who holds the real power over a story: the person who lived it or the person who tells it.