HIDDEN ROOMS by Kate Michaelson
Genre: traditional mystery
You can run fast. You can run far. But you can’t outrun family.
Long-distance runner, Riley, has been fighting various bewildering symptoms for months, from vertigo to fainting spells. Worse, her doctors can’t tell her what’s wrong, leaving her to wonder if it’s stress or something more threatening. But when her brother’s fiancée is killed—and he becomes the prime suspect—Riley must prove his innocence, despite the toll on her health.
As she reacquaints herself with the familiar houses and wild woods of her childhood, the secrets she uncovers take her on a trail to the real killer that leads right back to the very people she knows best and loves most.
Buy links: Amazon, Gathering Volumes, and Bookshop.org
Excerpt from Hidden Rooms:
Late September 2022
I grew up inside a lightning bolt, in a family of pure momentum. My siblings and I were young, stupid, and fearless in our white gingerbread house, surrounded by dark earth, green shoots, and wild woods—untamed beasts running loose from morning to night. We snarled and bucked, more a pack than a family.
Born less than a year apart, my brother Ethan and I spent most of our lives scrapping after the same few things, pinching each other where we knew it would hurt the most. But we also protected each other. When Trevor Paltree shoved Ethan off the metal slide the first day of preschool, I kicked Trevor’s little ass, and I’d do it again.
Only, now, I didn’t know what protecting my brother looked like, though I felt fairly certain that kicking his fiancée’s ass was not it. Besides, I couldn’t even say what exactly Beth was up to, which (admittedly) undermined my argument. Putting my head down and going along with the wedding might feel cowardly, but it also seemed like the least destructive path forward.
So, that’s how I found myself pulling up to Ethan and Beth’s house to pick up my puce monstrosity of a bridesmaid’s dress with Beth’s recent words still replaying in my mind. “Riley, you know I’d never do anything to hurt Ethan.” The problem was that she also once said with a wink and a smile that what Ethan didn’t know couldn’t hurt him.
I parked in the shade of a low-limbed oak and got out, lifting my hair off my neck to catch the breeze. The autumn sun had built throughout the afternoon into the kind of fleetingly gorgeous day that makes up for Ohio’s multitude of weather sins: one last warm postscript to summer. Rain loomed in the low shelf of clouds to the north. I crossed my fingers that it would hold off until I could get home to walk Bruno. Maybe I could even get a run in if my energy held out.
My phone buzzed, and I knew without looking it would be Audra. She called most days and knew that the previous night, I’d finally worked up the nerve to talk with Ethan about Beth. She would want the details. I was amazed she had waited this long.
“How’d it go with Ethan?” Her melodious voice skipped along briskly. People usually went with what she said simply because they were so swept with how she said it. As her sister, I was an exception.
“Hello to you too.” I continued toward the house but slowed my pace. “I’ll give you one guess.”
“Hello, dearest Riley. I guess he got mad.”
“Not just mad. He guilt-tripped me. I asked if he’d noticed anything wrong with Beth and he acted all injured about it. He told me, ‘she thinks you’re her friend.’” I mimicked Ethan’s self-righteous tone. The jab still stung. “I told him I think of her as a friend too, which is how I know she’s hiding something.” Admittedly, I couldn’t untangle what it was. It was something I sensed more than saw—a shift in posture or flicker behind an expression. The past few weeks she’d become more self-contained than ever, which was saying something for her.
“Yeah, but can you really be friends with someone who has no personality? It’s like being friends with a mannequin. I don’t know how you can tell if she’s hiding something when she never shares—”
“Look, I can’t talk about it now.” I lowered my voice as I neared the house. “I’m at their place getting my dress. Call you later.”
As I climbed the porch steps, the front of their house looked so Instagram-perfect that I wondered whether I’d been seeing problems that weren’t there. The afternoon light slanted across pumpkins and yellow chrysanthemums that Beth had arranged just so. Dried bundles of corn rattled in the breeze.
Careful not to disturb a precarious wreath of orange berries, I knocked on the door and tapped my foot, ready to grab my puffy dress and go. When no one answered, I rapped once more and tried the handle. Unlocked. This was not unusual in a town where nobody locked their doors, but Beth wasn’t from here. She’d moved to North Haven her senior year of high school and, thus, hadn’t lived here long enough for people to think of her as a local. But, to be fair, that usually took a lifetime.
{End of excerpt}
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