Search - Buried Lives

This book is about Joy Bard, a woman who struggles to remember her troubled childhood past. All she remembers about her past is that her brother,Buddy, was kidnapped when they were both young. As bits and pieces of memories start to come back to her, the people she loves most want her to stop trying so hard to remember the past. The closer Joy gets to remembering the terrible truth about her brother's disappearance, the more "someone" wants her to forget. On top of everything, Joy and her husband Lanny move into a new and unwelcoming neighborhood with awful neighbors.

Joy's life seems perfect on the outside: she is married to a successful lawyer, is pregnant with twins, and has just moved out of New York City and into a spacious Victorian house. Her past haunts her, though--or rather her lack of a past, since she cannot remember any of the details of her childhood. In particular, she has blocked out the kidnapping of her twin brother, Buddy. Her mother refuses to help bring the memories back, and her husband Lanny--who had been her brother's best friend and their next-door neighbor at the time of the kidnapping--insists that she is better off looking toward the future. But their new house's striking resemblance to her childhood home brings back fragments of memory, while adjusting to a new neighborhood and to pregnancy takes its toll. To make matters worse, Joy finds dead squirrels on the lawn and a mouse's head in the shower, incidents which turn out to be more than the mere pranks she initially assumes them to be.