Paper Ghosts

A Texas map marked with three red dots like drops of blood. A serial killer who claims to have dementia. A mysterious young woman who wants answers. What could go wrong?

From the bestselling author of Black-Eyed Susans comes a gripping thriller about the ghosts that live in our minds--and the ones that stare back from photographs.

An obsessive young woman has been waiting half her life--since she was twelve years old--for this moment. She has planned. Researched. Trained. Imagined every scenario. Now she is almost certain the man who kidnapped and murdered her sister sits in the passenger seat beside her.

Carl Louis Feldman is a documentary photographer who may or may not have dementia--and may or may not be a serial killer. The young woman claims to be his long-lost daughter. He doesn't believe her. He claims no memory of murdering girls across Texas, in a string of places where he shot eerie pictures. She doesn't believe him.

Determined to find the truth, she lures him out of a halfway house and proposes a dangerous idea: a ten-day road trip, just the two of them, to examine cold cases linked to his haunting photographs.

Is he a liar or a broken old man? Is he a pathological con artist? Or is she? In Paper Ghosts, Julia Heaberlin once again swerves the serial killer genre in a new direction. You won't see the final, terrifying twist spinning your way until the very last mile.

Advance praise for Paper Ghosts

"[An] artful and elegiac psychological thriller . . . The author wields words like weapons, with each one chosen to heighten tension, underscore emotion, or foreshadow doom. . . . Heaberlin brilliantly combines travelogue with a heartbreaking portrait of the damage done by childhood."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Paper Ghosts is an exceptional read, with a deftly woven plot--a book to devour in one sitting. This is breathless storytelling at its very best, with a deeply satisfying ending that will give book groups--and all your friends, when you recommend it--much to discuss."--Elizabeth Haynes, New York Times bestselling author of Into the Darkest Corner

"This book haunted me. The writing is beautiful and chilling, laced with a subtle dark humor, and the multiple twists build to a perfect icy shiver of an ending. I loved it!"--C. J. Tudor, author of The Chalk Man