Back to Lazarus

Why would a man hang himself twenty-four years after murdering his wife?

When I was six years old, my father killed my mother. He beat and choked her to death. I'm told that he was found hanging from a homemade noose in his cell. I want to know why he waited so long to do it. Sydney Brennan isn't sure how to answer her client's question, short of holding a séance, and the Tallahassee detective has some questions of her own. Why does Noel Thomas remember so little about her childhood? Why is she delving into her father's suicide now? And, most importantly, why is Noel lying to her? Crisscrossing the Florida Panhandle to reconstruct the tragic Thomas family history, Sydney stumbles across a link between the decades-old violence and a present-day web of deceit and corruption. To understand the connection, Sydney must go Back to Lazarus, back to the town where Noel's beautiful but troubled mother began her inevitable descent over twenty years ago. But by following in the footsteps of the murdered woman, does Sydney risk sharing her fate?

Rooted in bars and back roads and Panhandle prisons, forgotten towns and forgotten people, at its heart Back to Lazarus is about stories: the stories people tell us, the stories we tell ourselves, and what happens when we realize it's all a lie.