"Three can keep a secret if two are dead."
-Benjamin Franklin

The three girls have been inseparable best friends since third grade—Josie, the athletic one; Perri, the brilliant, acerbic drama queen; and Kat the beauty, who also had brains, grace, and a heart open to all around her. But their last day of high school becomes their final day together after one of them brings a gun to school to resolve a mysterious feud. When the police arrive, they discover two wounded girls. The third girl is dead, killed instantly by a shot to the heart.

For the shell-shocked parents, teachers, administrators, and students, healing must begin with answers to the usual questions—but only if the answers are safe ones, answers that will lead back to one girl and one family and absolve everyone else.

For Homicide Sgt. Harold Lenhardt, this case is a mystery with more twists than these grief-stricken suburbanites are willing to acknowledge—and the sole lucid survivor, a girl with a teenager's uncanny knack for stonewalling, strikes him as being less than honest. What is she concealing? Is she trying to protect herself or someone else? Even the simplest secrets can kill—and kill again if no one is willing to confront them.

Laura Lippman was a newspaper reporter at the Baltimore Sun for twelve years. Her
Teas Monaghan books—By a Spider's Thread, The Last Place, The Sugar House, Baltimore Blues, Charm City, Butchers Hill, and in Big Trouble—have won the Edgar, Agatha, Shamus, Anthony, and Nero Wolfe awards, and her novel In a Strange City was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed stand-alone novel Every Secret Thing. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Linda Emond has appeared on television in The Sopranos, Law & Order, and Wonderland. On Broadway she has performed in 1776 and Life x 3 for which she received a Tony® nomination. Her Off-Broadway work includes Tony Kushner's Homebody / Kabulioi which she received an Obie Award.