Before She Drowned: The Magnolia Series Book One
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 has spent six years becoming a journalist and fifteen of them staying away from Cedarbell County, Georgia. 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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