Restoration

EVERY SURVIVOR WHO WALKS THROUGH HER GATE TRUSTS HER. SHE HAS BEEN LYING TO ALL OF THEM.

Mara Venn escaped a cult and wrote the bestselling book about it. Then she built Restoration House, a lakeside retreat in northern Michigan where women who have survived coercion and control can finally sleep with the door unlocked. Her guests believe in her because she knows how love becomes a leash. She has told them everything about the Covenant.

Almost everything.

On a cold Monday in October, a new guest checks in under a false name, and Mara knows exactly why she has come. She is certain her past is about to walk through the door and take everything.

The woman has come for something else. Someone has been writing to former Covenant members, quoting details that only Mara could know.

Then a guest vanishes in the night. She leaves a calm, loving video explaining that she has chosen to go home to her husband. Days later, a second woman is gone: texts to her family, a signed discharge form, a warm and grateful farewell. Everyone at the House accepts it. Everyone says it was her choice.

Mara is the only one who sees how perfect it is.

Because she invented this. At the Covenant she designed exits exactly like these: tidy, documented, impossible for a worried family to argue with. She knows what the paperwork is for. She knows what it is hiding. And she cannot tell anyone how she knows without confessing what she did in her last years inside, and what she helped bury.

So she does what she was trained to do. She keeps quiet. She investigates alone. And she starts to find the thread that connects the missing women: each one said something in a private counseling session, behind a closed door at the House, that made her dangerous to someone far outside its walls.

The walls have been listening.

And the clock is not only hers. The Foundation that funds the House has called a Winter Review for November 13. Its board wants her records, her procedures, and her future on the table. A state police sergeant is asking polite questions over tea. A young caregiver who has walked into the House with a secret of her own is watching Mara more closely than a guest should. Every kind person in the building has a reason to smile, and Mara is running out of people she can afford to believe.

RESTORATION is a psychological thriller for readers who want to be unsettled and then moved. It is a tight, fast mystery with a lonely lake, a house full of secrets, and a ticking calendar. It is also a hard, honest look at what care can cost, and at the quiet cruelty of being told "it was your choice" by people who built the room you chose in.

You will love this book if you like:

•Suspense where the clues are fair and the answer is right in front of you
•A heroine who is brave, guilty, and impossible to look away from
•Stories about survivors who are believed, and survivors who aren't
•Claustrophobic settings, double lives, and secrets that surface in winter
•Endings that are earned, not tidy

FORTY CHAPTERS. FORTY-ONE DAYS. ONE CONFESSION THAT COULD SAVE THE WOMEN OR END EVERYTHING.

To find the missing alive, Mara will have to give up the one thing she has protected for twelve years, in public, with no way back. The people she has helped will decide what her care was worth. A family that has waited a dozen years will finally ask for an accounting.

She can lose her story or lose them. The clock is already running.

Start reading tonight. You will not want to stop until the gate opens.