Nora is the research assistant for a Vancouver PI and is doing her best to keep her head above water. After a horrific incident in her past she fell into the bottle but has been sober for years. She has made a life for herself; she even has a dog. Her life doesn’t seem like much to outsiders or her sister, but Nora is basically content illegally living in the basement of her office building saving up for better times. She’s starting to think she may have enough savings to start looking for an apartment when the distraught parents of a missing teenager contact her to meet with them. They aren’t looking for her boss, they want Nora’s help. Through a paperwork mishap years ago they have always know the name of their daughter’s birth mother, Nora Watts, and they think their daughter may have been searching for the mother who gave her up for adoption when she disappeared.
Nora would like to kid herself that she hasn’t thought about her daughter since she gave birth, but she has (especially since Nora woke up after a six month coma to find herself very pregnant with little memory of the events leading up to the discovery of her battered body by a hiker.) Nora’s really mad because she gave the baby up knowing the child would have a better life than with her and now she finds out the child, a teenager, has run away from home before. What kind of life did she give her daughter when she gave her up? Will Nora be able to find her? What if the mystery surrounding her daughter’s disappearance has bearing on Nora’s past?
This is a dark and gritty novel with a heroine that you at turns empathize with and dislike. She doesn’t always make good decisions, but when her backstory is revealed her attitudes and choices make more sense. As the layers of the mystery are peeled back as a reader you begin to feel the paranoia alongside Nora: who are her friends, who are her enemies and why do they want her daughter?
