Mad Honey

Olivia McAfee once believed she had the perfect life — a surgeon husband, a beautiful house in Boston, a young son. When that marriage turned dangerous, she fled with her boy back to her small New Hampshire hometown, took over her late father's beekeeping business, and rebuilt quietly among the hives. Years later her son Asher is a well-liked high-school senior, gentle and in love for the first time, with a new girl in town named Lily Campanello.

Then Lily is found dead, and Asher is arrested for her murder. As the case moves toward trial, Olivia is forced to confront how little she may truly know about her own son — and to face the unsettling ways he reminds her of the man she once ran from. Alongside Olivia's account runs Lily's own story, unspooling in reverse toward the day everything ended, laying bare the secrets a young woman carried and the person she was still becoming.

Written in alternating voices by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan, Mad Honey is a courtroom drama and a mother-son story braided together, threaded through with the strange lore of bees. Tender and propulsive, it is a novel about love, identity, and how well any of us can ever know the people closest to us.