EVERY SINGLE LIE

A mournful mystery about a tragic teen pregnancy.

Beckett Bergen’s still reeling from her father’s overdose death seven months ago, and now she’s ruing her too recent and impulsive breakup with boyfriend Jake, but her bad day gets worse when she discovers a corpse in Clifford High’s locker room. It’s not a fellow student but a newborn, unnamed, unknown, and left in a gym bag. First a police witness, then a suspect, Beckett also becomes a local and even national scapegoat, pilloried on an anonymous social media account and hounded by national news reporters. Unlike her police officer mother, Beckett’s no detective—not even a Veronica Mars or Nancy Drew—but she is determined to identify the baby’s parents, if only to clear her name and protect her family’s already-damaged reputation. It’s a small Tennessee town with a small pool of suspects, but Beckett’s amateur sleuthing soon goes awry, and the already-alienated Beckett risks offending her friends and family. Setting aside her trademark paranormal fantasy and romance, Vincent anchors her real-world tale in a carefully detailed portrait of a fraying family, a scathing look at small-town rumors, and a blunt critique of social media’s rapid, rabid tendencies. Here, the demons are personal and societal, and characters are haunted only by their mistakes. Beckett is White.

Thoughtful and somber.