The Woman At My Father's Funeral

"I already buried you once." Investigative journalist Lacey Ford returns to her rural North Carolina hometown to bury her father, Warren. He was a simple agricultural salesman, a man of consistent habits and quiet faith. Or so she thought. When a weeping stranger approaches his casket and utters an impossible sentence, Lacey's world shatters. The stranger, Mira Dane, claims to have been Warren's common-law wife. She also claims he died in a boating accident on Jordan Lake fifteen years ago. Armed with her journalistic instincts, Lacey begins to dig into the life of the man she thought she knew. What she unearths is a chilling conspiracy: a fabricated identity, a $750,000 life insurance payout, and a desperate farmer's decades-long attempt to anonymously repay the people he helped cheat. But the deeper Lacey digs, the more dangerous the truth becomes. Her father didn't die of a natural cardiac event in his isolated garden shed. His medication was tampered with. He was silenced. And the brilliant, ruthless architect of his fake death has returned to Blackwater County to collect the final piece of evidence hidden inside an old brass compass. Now, Lacey is caught in a deadly cat-and-mouse game. If she surrenders the evidence, the killer walks free. If she goes to the police, her own mother will be framed for the murder.