What We Remember — Michael Thomas Ford

Every family has a hidden story--even the perfect ones. Dig just a little, beyond the smiling holiday photographs and the oft-repeated anecdotes, and other memories come flooding back--the kind that can compel a family to stick together through catastrophe, or drive a chasm between them forever.
On the morning James McCloud, a Seattle district attorney, gets a call from his sister, Celeste, he senses his own long-buried family history is about to be dragged into the light. James's father, Daniel, a police officer, disappeared eight years ago. Now his body has finally been found. James always believed that his father committed suicide after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the evidence leaves no doubt: Daniel was murdered.

James immediately returns to Cold Falls, New York, to be with the rest of his family. His mother, Ada, seems worn out and blank with disbelief. James's brother, Billy, is twenty-one, gay, and even more troubled than James remembers. His brother-in-law, Nate Derry, is the town sheriff charged with investigating the case, and the mistrust that has hovered between them--ever since James dated Nate's stepsister Nancy years ago--still exists. When James's high school ring is discovered with Daniel's body, making him the prime suspect, the McCloud and Derry families are both thrust into controversy and chaos. And as the truth emerges, piece by piece, so do the shadows and secrets in each relationship--secrets powerful enough to threaten another life and destroy the bonds that still remain.

Both suspenseful and deeply moving, What We Remember paints a compelling, thought-provoking portrait of a family as ordinary, as unique, as comforting and strange as our own. With unerring insight and candor, Michael Thomas Ford explores the complex ties--between fathers and sons, brothers and sisters, mother and child--that we may strive to leave behind but are compelled to carry with us, and reveals how little we can ever know with certainty, especially about those closest to us.