From former NPR correspondent and acclaimed author of Anonymous Sources Mary Louise Kelly comes an “action-packed page-turner” (Publishers Weekly) about fear, family secrets, and one woman’s hunt for answers about the murder of her parents.

Caroline Cashion is beautiful, intelligent, a professor of French literature. But in a split second, everything she’s known is proved to be a lie.

A single bullet is found lodged at the base of her skull. It makes no sense: Caroline has never been shot. Then, she learns the truth: that she was adopted when she was three years old, after her real parents were murdered. Caroline was wounded the night they were attacked, a gunshot to the neck. Surgeons had stitched her up with the bullet still there, nestled deep among vital nerves and blood vessels.

Now, Caroline has to find the truth of her past. Why were her parents killed? Why is she still alive? She returns to her hometown, where she learns that the bullet in her neck is the same bullet that killed her mother. It hit Caroline’s mother and kept going, hurtling through the mother’s chest and into the child hiding behind her.

She is horrified—and in danger. The bullet in her neck could finger a murderer. A frantic race is set in motion: Can Caroline unravel the clues to her past before the killer tracks her down?