Before She Drowned: Book One of Magnolia Series
The call came at 2:14 in the morning, and the name on the screen was MOTHER - but Eleanor Merritt was already dead.
Sloane Merritt built a career telling other people's darkest stories, and spent fifteen years making sure no one told hers. She knows that time is the spine of every story, and the thing people lie about first. So when a sheriff's deputy tells her that her mother drowned in the backyard pool on Camellia Street - a quiet accident, a still night, nothing to see - the timeline is the first thing that doesn't sit right.
Coming home to bury Eleanor means coming home to magnolias and old money and older silences, to a town that remembers Sloane as someone else's daughter and would rather not discuss what her mother had been doing these last months. Because Eleanor had been busy. Keeping appointments. Keeping a routine. Keeping a document she was never meant to find - and keeping a standing dinner with the one friend who knew her best of all.
The deeper Sloane reads, the clearer it gets: her mother wasn't drifting toward the end of a quiet life. She was arming herself. The accident is a story someone told very well - and the true one runs back through a father's long-ago death that no one in Cedarbell ever called murder, straight to the families who built this county and the crime they buried to build it.
Sloane came home for a funeral. She means to leave with the truth - if it doesn't pull her under first.
Southern Gothic meets domestic noir in Before She Drowned, the first novel in the Magnolia Series: a slow-burn thriller about grief, buried history, and the lies a genteel town tells to keep its heirlooms clean.
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