Official Release Date

I’m excited to announce that the official release date for my debut novel, Afta-U is June 30, 2015! We are now taking pre-orders.

Preview:

Twenty-nine years after the tragic and untimely death of her childhood best friend, Hope Marksman, author Jean Cartwright Rhodes, returns home to live in Graytown, Massachusetts, with her husband and daughter, when she’s willed the house Hope had grown up in. Now years later, she is haunted by a dark truth from her past that won’t go away quietly. “I wasn’t sure when the anxiety over your death finally took a firm hold, but one day it did, and after…”

 

 

Visible through her kitchen window, are two stark reminders of her troubled past that sit perched on the lawn, the Afta-U sailboat and the old oak tree, where eleven-year-old Hope met her death at the hands of another child. Similar to a chess game filled with unexpected moves, Jean begins to slowly unravel piece by piece as devastating secrets and lies from the past are uncovered. She struggles with the impacts of her decisions, and the significance of the direct and indirect ripples they have had on so many lives around her.

 

 

And from one failed strategic move, Jean faces Hope’s killer, “(He) must’ve sensed my inner turmoil and calmly proclaimed, ‘Now please tell me you didn’t think they’d leave an eleven-year-old boy in a facility for almost thirty years, did you?’ The smile extended farther across his face.”