I am thrilled beyond words to announce that Ballantine Books will publish my as-yet-untitled second novel in Summer 2017.

Right now, the book is in the revision phase with my editor, and we’re going back and forth, tightening it down—for those of you who know me well, it will come as no surprise that I tend to overwrite—and making it as good as it can possibly be. The manuscript was originally a bit of a behemoth (over 650 pages) so we’ve had a lot of tightening to do! But we’re nearing the end now, and I can’t wait to see the final product . . . sort of like watching a sculpture emerge from a hunk of clay.

A lot has happened since the 2012 release of The Memory Thief. In 2015, as I was working furiously to meet my deadline for Book 2, I got an email from my agent asking for my approval on a promotion for Memory Thief’s ebook. Caught up in the maelstrom of deadline madness, I absentmindedly agreed—and promptly forgot all about it, until I got a phone call one evening from my editor, letting me know that the ebook version of Memory Thief had squeaked its way onto the New York Times bestseller list. I was so shocked, I almost dropped the phone.

But that wasn’t all. A few weeks later, we heard from Tantor, a company that wanted to produce an audiobook version of Memory Thief. Now, this would be exciting under any circumstances, but it was especially awesome because—given the fact that it had been published three years prior—Memory Thief was officially a backlist title. And once a title becomes backlist, it’s fairly rare for an audiobook deal to come along. I was thrilled—and even more so to learn that the audiobook would be produced as an ensemble cast, with a different actor voicing each of my three narrators. The audiobook came out in February 2016, over four years after Memory Thief came into the world, and it’s just as fantastic as I’d hoped it would be.

Which brings me to Novel #2, an epic adventure that has taken me from the libraries and beaches of Barbados to coffeehouses and abandoned lighthouses off the coast of Charleston. I’ve spent time chatting with archaeologists amongst relics, and been a mixed martial arts dojo voyeur. I’ve read and researched and written, written, written. So much has gone into the creation of this book that it’s a little hard for me to believe that it’s actually coming to fruition. But it is, and I couldn’t be happier.

Here’s a sneak peek into what the book is all about—with photos and more on my website’s “In the Works” page. I’ll be updating my blog with cover and title reveals, as well as snippets from the book itself, so stay tuned!

When single mom and archaeologist Isabel Griffin gets an emergency phone call while on a dig in Barbados one day, her first thought is that something’s happened to her daughter, Finn—a little girl who doesn’t quite fit the norm. But when she answers the phone, the voice on the other end is the last one she expects to hear. The caller is her old boyfriend, Max—gone missing in the woods almost eight years ago and presumed dead, by everyone except Isabel. He only utters a single, mysterious sentence (“Keep her safe”) before they’re disconnected, and when Isabel tries to call him back, she’s met with the same automated message she’s been hearing for years—that the number she’s dialed is no longer in service.

Max is much more than just Isabel’s ex-boyfriend—he’s her childhood best friend and secret-keeper. He’s the one who was there for her after her mom’s unexplained disappearance fourteen years before and the only person who really understood the depth of her father’s obsession with finding his long-lost wife. And he’s Finn’s father—which Isabel had just told him the day before he vanished, less than fifty feet from the place where she was standing.

Isabel has already lost two of the people she loves the most, and she has no intention of losing Finn too. Evidence or no evidence, she is sure the phone call was from Max—and that it is a warning that her daughter is in danger. She searches in vain for a rational explanation, and finds none. But when Max begins appearing to her—in her room, on the flagstones of her backyard patio—then vanishing when she tries to talk to him, Isabel must determine whether she is losing her mind, or whether there is more to reality than she—a scientist—has ever been willing to acknowledge. She is determined to uncover the truth . . . but the more she learns about what really happened in the woods that day, the more she is forced to question all of her assumptions about love, courage and the nature of family.