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Playing Dead

A Novel

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

“A compelling family mystery that kept me turning the pages. Highly recommended.”—Margaret Maron, New York Times bestselling author of Three Day Town
 
“Dear Tommie: Have you ever wondered about who you are?”
 
The letter that turns Tommie McCloud’s world upside down arrives from a stranger only days after her father’s death. The woman who wrote it claims that Tommie is her daughter—and that she was kidnapped as a baby thirty-one years ago.
 
Tommie wants to believe it’s all a hoax, but suddenly a girl who grew up on a Texas ranch finds herself  linked to a horrific past: the slaughter of a family in Chicago, the murder of an Oklahoma beauty queen, and the kidnapping of a little girl named Adriana. Tommie races along a twisting, nightmarish path while an unseen stalker is determined to keep old secrets locked inside the dementia-battered brain of the woman who Tommie always thought was her real mother. With everything she has ever believed in question, and no one she can trust, Tommie must discover the truth about the girl who vanished—and the very real threats that still remain. 
 
“[Julia Heaberlin’s] voice is pitch perfect, and her story of one woman’s fierce struggle to reconcile her past with her present is gripping and powerful. An outstanding debut.”—Carla Buckley, author of Invisible

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    • Kirkus

      May 15, 2012
      Every family has a deep dark secret. Maybe more than one. When the letter arrives in Ponder, Texas, Tommie McCloud thinks it's the work of a scam artist. After 42 readings of it, she's not so sure. Could this Chicagoan claiming to be her mother, telling her that she was really the Adriana who had been kidnapped just after her first birthday, that her father was crime boss Anthony Marchetti, be telling the truth? Tommie can't ask the man who raised her, a retired federal marshal who just passed away. The woman she's always believed to be her mother has Alzheimer's, and her brother Tuck perished in a car accident when he was 18. But her sister Sadie remembers overhearing a conversation between their parents that might lend credence to the letter. When Jack Smith, supposedly a reporter, pops up on the family's doorstep to write about Tommie's work healing traumatized kids with horseback-riding therapy, she's suspicious. What reporter wears an ankle holster under his jeans? With assists from Hudson, a former boyfriend with lifetime access to FBI files (don't ask), Tommie discovers ties to a girl's unsolved murder, the slaughter years back of an FBI agent and his family, and Smith's true agenda: confronting Marchetti, recently incarcerated in Texas. Still, Tommie's confused about the contents of two bank vaults maintained by her mother. Deciphering their meaning will reveal more than one family secret, but not before Tommie is tailed, assaulted, shot at and finally saved by the intervention of Marchetti. First-timer Heaberlin combines equal parts gruesome (a mummified child's finger) and poignant (Tommie's niece's brain tumor) with perhaps a smidgen too many secrets for a single plot.

      COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Booklist

      May 1, 2012
      Questions of identity are plaguing Texas psychologist Tommie McCloud. First she gets a letter from the wife of Chicago mobster Anthony Marchetti (in prison for killing an FBI agent and his family) suggesting that Tommie is her daughter who was kidnapped as a baby. Then a man masquerading as a reporter turns up asking questions. With her older brother and father dead and her mother suffering from dementia, Tommie is on her own in finding answers, with backup protection from military contractor Hudson Byrd, once her lover on the rodeo circuit, whose contacts prove invaluable as matters turn dangerous for the affluent McCloud family. There's a lot going on in this first novelodd newspaper clippings found in Tommie's mother's bank safe-deposit box, visits with and messages from Marchetti (recently transferred from a Chicago prison to one in nearby Texas), mysterious heirs to the family estatebut Heaberlin manages to tie up all the loose ends. Tommie is a smart, sassy, loving, and doggedly persistent narrator in this fast-moving mystery, which occasionally tugs at the heartstrings. A promising debut.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

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