JENNY SILER

Discovered by a group of Benedictine nuns in a muddy ditch by the side of a French country road, Eve has only good American dentistry and a tattered Moroccan ferry ticket scribbled with Arabic letters to point her to her identity. That, and a bullet to her brain that she miraculously survives, even as it destroys her memory. Only a few scattered violent images remain, along with one undeniable physical fact: she has had a child.

Plagued by horrific nightmares, reluctant to face the truth about her past, Eve makes a life for herself within the convent's walls. But when the nuns who have sheltered her for a year are brutally massacred and the one terrified survivor declares to Eve: "They came for you," Eve realizes that, whoever she was in her past life, she had powerful enemies, enemies who still wish to harm her and those around her. Just a half step ahead of her pursuers, she lights out for Morocco in a desperate attempt to retrace her steps, uncover her past, and figure out who's after her, and why--before it's too late.

Eve's search takes her from the squalid waterfront of Tangier to the crowded souks and elegant nightclubs of Marrakech, from the strange world of lost expatriates to an arms dealer's desolate retreat on the fringe of the Sahara. A spellbinding story of deception and loss, Flashback grabs the reader with its opening pages and never lets go.

From the outside, Carl and Lucy Greene seemed to be living the good life: they had a huge suburban mansion paid for by Carl's biotech job, and Lucy had the leisure to pursue her painting. But cracks in the facade--a child born with severe birth defects who only lived a few hours, and the couple's subsequent estrangement--had already put strains on their marriage. And then, during a business trip to the West Coast Carl abruptly dies.

The story is that he had a car accident. But why did Carl contact their old friend Kevin, a recently discredited TV journalist just a few days before he died, with promises of a big story? Why does an intruder break into Carl's office after the funeral? And what does any of this have to do with a rash of prison TB, their baby's encephalocele, or Lucy's brother's post-Gulf War willness?

Lucy wants some answers, and before she knows it she's careening across the western landscape with a hired killer on her trail, warned that she's messing with some very big players. With the help of Kevin, who's also an ex-boyfriend, and an ex-con named Darcy, Lucy searches for the truth even as she seeks to put her own troubled past to rest. In helping her, Kevin wants to resuscitate his career, and Darcy wants to protect her junkie sister, who's still on the inside. But with her loved ones dead and a Glock for a new best friend, Lucy is the one who will do whatever it takes to uncover the real story behind her husband's death.

On a cold December day in Missoula, Montana, the police pull Clay Bennett's corpse from the weeds. For the cops, Bennett's death is an open-and-shut case, the result of a drunken brawl gone out of control. For repo woman Meg Gardner, who'd been looking to snag Bennett's Jeep, his death is an opportunity: Without him around to make life difficult, the job should be a breeze.

Only one year out of prison, romantically involved, and working the first legitimate job she's ever had, all Meg wants is to keep things clean and simple. So when Bennett's Jeep is broken into outside her house by a bunch of Russian thugs, instinct and experience demand that she walk away. But then she learns about the missing military plane Bennett had been hunting obsessively before he was killed -- the same plane he crashed in the wilderness forty years earlier. And when a tattooed woman with an astonishing facility for knives shows up in town, Meg has no choice but to seek the real cause of Bennett's death.

Desperate to protect what little she has, and driven by ghosts from her own past, Meg plunges ahead -- and finds herself involved in a dangerous web of infidelity, greed, and murder.

Just off Bainbridge Island, in the early evening, a former top-ranking CIA officer mysteriously drowns. In Key West, a drug runner is found with a bullet lodged in his skull. And outside Seattle a young woman arrives in a dimly lit bar to pick up a computer disk. Moments later, she stumbles upon the body of her contact, dead in the bathroom.

To Allie Kerry, the pickup had been no more than a business arrangement: no hassles, no strings, easy money. But suddenly Allie is on the run. Someone is setting her up to take the fall. Someone who knows what's on the disc. Someone who will stop at nothing to conceal the evidence of a horrific crime.

Reaching back to a brilliantly concealed operation during the Vietnam War, ducking into drug dens, spiraling through seeding strip joints, and blazing across the country, Jenny Siler weaves a devastating tale of murder and deception in her stunning debut.