The Only Child
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
"Almost every graduating class had a girl who disappeared . . ."
A long-closed home for “fallen women” is the site of horrors old and new in this "taut, clever whodunit" (Kate Quinn) from the author of The Botanist’s Daughter.
1949: During the coldest winter Seattle has seen in decades, pregnant sixteen-year-old Brigid Ryan arrives at Fairmile, a home for “fallen women” run by the Catholic Church on a remote island in Puget Sound. She and her baby will disappear before the snow melts.
2013: Ex-cop Frankie Gray is escaping a career in ruins and hoping to reconnect with her teenage daughter, Izzy, while summering with her mother at The Fairmile Inn, soon to be a boutique hotel. But when an elderly nun who worked at the home in its former iteration is found dead in suspicious circumstances and then a tiny skeleton is discovered on the grounds nearby, Frankie goes looking for answers. Then Izzy disappears, and as Frankie races to find her, she turns up a secret that will force her to question her own history and the identity she thought she knew.
Over sixty years separate the disappearances at the Fairmile, but Frankie suspects that they may share the same dark root; in the suspenseful, atmospheric investigation that follows, she finds that the truth is as foggy as the rocky, isolated island on which that darkness thrived.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This gripping mystery from Nunn (The Forgotten Letters of Esther Durrant) alternates between Brigid, a plucky 16-year-old who's banished by her family when her pregnancy becomes evident in 1949, and Frankie Gray, a brave but angst-ridden former police officer in 2013, who's trying to reconnect with her 15-year-old daughter, Izzy. Frankie has come to Orcades Island in Puget Sound, Wash., to help her mother renovate Fairmile, a long-abandoned mansion that once housed a Catholic home for unwed mothers. When Frankie hears of a suspicious death at the assisted living facility where her grandmother's a resident, she immediately heads there. Frankie slips past the police and catches a glimpse of the crime scene, noting the twine that binds the elderly victim, a former nun, to her bed. Back at Fairmile, workmen uncover the long-buried body of an infant. Frankie investigates, but the stakes rise when Izzy disappears. The chapters about Brigid dramatically reveal the casual cruelty she suffered during her pregnancy and her will to survive. The skillful plot matches the two distinctive leads. This reminder of the harrowing realities faced by women pre–Roe v. Wade couldn't be more timely.
