Playing Dead

May 15, 2012
Every family has a deep dark secret. Maybe more than one. When the letter arrives in Ponder, Texas, Tommie McCloud thinks it's the work of a scam artist. After 42 readings of it, she's not so sure. Could this Chicagoan claiming to be her mother, telling her that she was really the Adriana who had been kidnapped just after her first birthday, that her father was crime boss Anthony Marchetti, be telling the truth? Tommie can't ask the man who raised her, a retired federal marshal who just passed away. The woman she's always believed to be her mother has Alzheimer's, and her brother Tuck perished in a car accident when he was 18. But her sister Sadie remembers overhearing a conversation between their parents that might lend credence to the letter. When Jack Smith, supposedly a reporter, pops up on the family's doorstep to write about Tommie's work healing traumatized kids with horseback-riding therapy, she's suspicious. What reporter wears an ankle holster under his jeans? With assists from Hudson, a former boyfriend with lifetime access to FBI files (don't ask), Tommie discovers ties to a girl's unsolved murder, the slaughter years back of an FBI agent and his family, and Smith's true agenda: confronting Marchetti, recently incarcerated in Texas. Still, Tommie's confused about the contents of two bank vaults maintained by her mother. Deciphering their meaning will reveal more than one family secret, but not before Tommie is tailed, assaulted, shot at and finally saved by the intervention of Marchetti. First-timer Heaberlin combines equal parts gruesome (a mummified child's finger) and poignant (Tommie's niece's brain tumor) with perhaps a smidgen too many secrets for a single plot.

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May 1, 2012
Questions of identity are plaguing Texas psychologist Tommie McCloud. First she gets a letter from the wife of Chicago mobster Anthony Marchetti (in prison for killing an FBI agent and his family) suggesting that Tommie is her daughter who was kidnapped as a baby. Then a man masquerading as a reporter turns up asking questions. With her older brother and father dead and her mother suffering from dementia, Tommie is on her own in finding answers, with backup protection from military contractor Hudson Byrd, once her lover on the rodeo circuit, whose contacts prove invaluable as matters turn dangerous for the affluent McCloud family. There's a lot going on in this first novelodd newspaper clippings found in Tommie's mother's bank safe-deposit box, visits with and messages from Marchetti (recently transferred from a Chicago prison to one in nearby Texas), mysterious heirs to the family estatebut Heaberlin manages to tie up all the loose ends. Tommie is a smart, sassy, loving, and doggedly persistent narrator in this fast-moving mystery, which occasionally tugs at the heartstrings. A promising debut.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)