The Roots We Hide

Twenty-four years ago, Jo Whitfield's mother vanished without a trace, leaving behind a little girl and a silence nobody in Kestrel Hollow would break. Jo built a career reading the truth locked inside DNA because the one disappearance she couldn't solve was her own mother's — until a flood tears open the ground behind her family's property and gives up bones that have been waiting decades to be found.

The remains aren't her mother's. They're someone else's — and Deputy U.S. Marshal Nate Calder is already there, chasing a different case that has just collided with Jo's. His mentor died working this town's secrets. Hers disappeared inside them. Neither of them expected the answer to require the other.

As Jo's genealogy work peels back one generation after another, a horrifying pattern emerges: her mother wasn't the only woman from their bloodline the hollow ever lost. Someone has been watching this family, patiently, for far longer than anyone imagined — and Jo's own daughter is next in a line that was never supposed to be traced this far.

Working alongside Nate means trusting a man trained to hunt people for a living with the only mystery Jo has never been able to close. It also means falling for him right as the truth buried in her family's roots turns out to be very much still alive, and very aware that she's getting close.

THE ROOTS WE HIDE is Book One of the Quietline series: a romantic suspense about inherited secrets, the families that keep them, and the quiet, decades-long violence of being believed instead of found.