Briarfen's Bitter Bloom

Maren Halloway steps off the coach at a crossroads she never expected to see again, the flint road of Briarfen pale as old bone beneath her boots. She has come home for a funeral , Orin Veil, patriarch of one of the village's two founding families, has died under circumstances no one will name plainly. His grieving brother, Mayor Aldous Veil, insists the matter is closed. His daughter Lenna, haunted and hollow-eyed, cannot say the same. Maren was raised alongside the Veils and the Drusts, the other dynasty that shares Briarfen's marshy soil, and she knows the cost of growing up where every hedge holds a memory and every grudge is inherited. Reuniting with her aunt Elspeth and her sharp-tongued childhood friend Tilly Brackenford, Maren begins to ask the questions the village has spent years avoiding. Why did Orin fall ill so suddenly? Why has the name Holly Quick begun to circulate in whispered parish gossip? And what is the true connection between Lenna Veil and the Drust family , a bond that some insist is more than it seems? The deeper Maren digs, the more she finds that Briarfen's two clans have been hiding each other's sins for generations, and that the bitter bloom of the title's namesake , a poisonous weed that thrives in neglected soil , has been flourishing on the marsh for far too long. To expose the truth, Maren must risk the only home she has left and the only family willing to take her in. Some secrets, after all, are meant to stay buried. Others will kill to remain so.