A novelist vanishes, a lawyer sister hunts
When aspiring novelist Ella disappears, her lawyer sister Charlotte follows the clues left in Ella's unpublished manuscript. The missing woman's fiction becomes the map to what happened to her.
Dead Certain: A Novel (Broden Legal Book 1)
4 ideas
Fiction as coded confession
Ella's novel mirrors her real secret affairs and dangers, blurring what is invented and what is true. The device forces reader and investigator alike to decode a story for facts.
The double life beneath a quiet person
Charlotte discovers her sister moved between multiple men and hidden identities. The plot turns on how little we know the private lives of people close to us.
The narrator you should not trust
The book withholds and reshuffles perspective so the reader's certainty keeps collapsing. It uses unreliable narration to make the title's dead certainty ironic.