She Taught Me Everything

Linton debuts with the entrancing tale of a woman who discovers family secrets while her older sister is in a coma. When Sarasota, Fla., artist Nicola Jones learns her sister, Vivian Jones Rowan, is in a Nashville ICU, having barely survived a car accident that killed Vivian’s husband, she rushes to the hospital, where she learns that Vivian is 25 weeks pregnant. Shocked that Vivian hadn’t told her, Nicola struggles to manage her sister’s care as she tries to unlock a series of mysteries. First, she receives a call from a private detective Vivian hired two months earlier, who says he can’t tell Nicola what he’s looking for or what he’s found so far, and only asks whether he should continue working on the case. Nicola suspects Vivian may have hired the detective to find their parents, who abandoned them as children. While searching through Vivian’s things for clues, she finds her own birth certificate, which is dated several days before Vivian’s, a discovery that puts her and her sister’s origins into question. Linton gets the reader invested with detailed character work and crackerjack plotting. This one is hard to put down. (Self-published)