Safe and Sound
A Novel
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Six years after their cousin vanished from their home while they were sleeping, two sisters set out to learn the truth behind what happened—even if it puts their own lives in danger—in this haunting thriller from the internationally bestselling author of What’s Done in Darkness.
“Beautifully written, unflinchingly told, and relentlessly suspenseful.”—Heather Gudenkauf, author of The Overnight Guest
In a town no one ever leaves, there are only so many places to hide.
As kids, Amelia and Kylee were found unharmed in their upstairs bedroom the night their teenage cousin Grace, who was babysitting them, vanished from the farmhouse in Beaumont, Missouri, leaving blood all over the kitchen. Scrappy and driven, Grace, the first in their family to go to college instead of getting married and working at the meatpacking plant, had been on the verge of escaping their dead-end town. Her disappearance is a warning to any local girl who dared hope for better.
Now, as their own high school graduation looms, Amelia and Kylee dream about fleeing Beaumont, but the likelihood of that happening seems as low as that of Grace being found. When human remains are discovered in town, the sisters think they finally know who took Grace—but as they dig deeper into her past, they unearth long-buried secrets and a growing list of suspects.
Amelia and Kylee vow to find Grace, dead or alive. But as they draw closer to the truth and slip further into danger, they question how far someone would go to put a woman in her place, or to cover up a crime. The answer is worse than they could have imagined, and in the end, it won’t just be Grace they’re trying to save—they’ll have to fight for their lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McHugh's standout latest (after The Weight of Blood) centers on the disappearance of teenager Grace Crow, who vanished from her small hometown of Beaumont, Mo., while babysitting her cousins, Amelia and Kylee, leaving behind only a pool of blood. Six years later, Amelia is waitressing at the local Waffle House and encouraging the younger Kylee to finish high school so they can leave Beaumont and avoid the fates of their aunt, who punches a clock at the meatpacking plant, and mother, who works as a stripper. Amelia has never gotten over Grace's disappearance, and often wonders if Alan, her seedy manager at the Waffle House (where Grace also worked), might have had something to do with it. When an unidentified young woman's remains turn up near the county line, Amelia and Kylee ramp up their sleuthing efforts, adding Grace's boyfriend, Levi, to their list of suspects. As they get closer to the truth, the sisters come to fear that whoever made Grace disappear won't hesitate to do the same to them. McHugh seamlessly combines eerie mystery with gritty social realism, grounding the story's hair-raising jolts in the emotional realities of her three-dimensional characters. Readers won't be able to put this down.
