Christmas Presents

Madeline Martin runs The Next Chapter, a bookshop in a small town where everyone knows what happened to her. She is the only surviving victim of Evan Handy, convicted of murdering her best friend and long suspected in the disappearance of two other girls she grew up with. She has built a careful life around that fact and around caring for her ailing father.

Then Harley Granger arrives: a failed novelist turned true-crime podcaster, determined to reopen the case. Since Handy went to prison, more young women have gone missing, and Harley thinks that means someone else was always involved.

As a blizzard closes in over Christmas, Madeline and her childhood friend Badger go back into a past they both hoped was finished. Lisa Unger's holiday novella is a compact, unsettling suspense story about the cost of survival and how close the truth can live.