WHAT NEVER HAPPENED

A girl’s life is forever altered when her family is murdered.

Back in 2001, Colette “Coco” Weber and her family were among the very few Black residents of Avalon on California’s Santa Catalina Island. Her mother, a lawyer, and her father, a teacher at the island’s high school, had tired of commuting from the mainland. Coco was a teen looking for adventure when she came home one night to find entirely too much of it: Her parents and her brother, a football star, were all dead. Nineteen years later, Coco, at odds with her actor husband, Micah, returns to Avalon to work on the local paper owned by her college friend Maddy, where she writes offbeat obituaries. Then she learns that the man who was convicted of murdering her family is being released on new DNA evidence. Although she’s inherited her parents’ Avalon house, it’s been occupied by her aunt Gwen, who, thinking of it as her own, switches between loving and hostile. The house is a mess, but Coco, who’s liberated a valuable ring from Micah, plans to use the proceeds from its sale to fix up the place. Soon she’s receiving racist threats and offers to buy her home that make her equally furious. Slowly a pattern emerges: elderly widows who own their own homes have been found dead in unexpected places, the police writing off each case as a natural death. Only her fellow reporter and soon-to-be lover, handsome, rich Noah Bancroft, believes in Coco’s idea that a serial killer is at work. Troubled by panic attacks and her inability to discern what’s real in either past or present, Coco seeks the truth as Covid ravages California.

A character-rich, sleep-depriving thriller.