Summit Lake

Summit Lake is a quiet, postcard-pretty town in North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains — the last place anyone expected a killing. But Becca Eckersley, a first-year law student and the daughter of a powerful attorney, was found brutally murdered in a lake house there, and two weeks on the police have nothing.

Kelsey Castle, an investigative reporter recovering from a trauma of her own, is sent to Summit Lake to turn the case into a magazine feature. What begins as an assignment becomes something closer to an obsession: as Kelsey retraces Becca's last days, talks to the people who knew her, and reads what she left behind, the boundary between reporter and victim starts to blur.

Charlie Donlea's debut unfolds on two timelines — Kelsey's present-day investigation and the college years in which Becca, torn between two friends and burdened with a secret, walked toward her own death. The answer is not the one the town has settled on.