What Lies Beneath: A Laura Chambers Novel

When a mangled corpse of a woman is found holding a photograph of her, her father and her “imaginary” friend from childhood, investigative journalist Laura Chambers, as the lines between fact and fiction blur, digs into the history of the deceased and her own family to discover what lies beneath.
The deeply flawed but intrepid Laura Chambers, from the “dark and vivid rabbit hole” (David Bell) of a thriller Last Girl Gone, finds herself lost in the deadly webs of small town secrets as she hunts for the truth about her father, who mysteriously disappeared several years ago.Tell me two truths and a lie.A year after her tangle with a local killer that left her disfigured, Laura is done licking her wounds. And she’s done with the small town of Hillsborough, North Carolina. But the sheriff just found the mangled body of a woman who was reported missing several weeks ago. Her last phone call was to Laura.With an unidentifiable face, Laura can’t shed light on why she was this woman’s final call. To break free of the hostile sheriff’s suspicion, Laura digs into the history of the deceased. What she finds completely upturns all she thought she knew or remembered. It’s an old picture of Laura from when she was just a young girl, standing with her father, her father’s best friend, and another little girl who Laura could have sworn was just a figment of her imagination. What else has she been mistaking for fiction? For truth? And more importantly—what did this woman have to do with her missing father? What was she calling to tell Laura?
Laura Chambers finds herself caught in a deadly web of small town secrets as she hunts for the truth about her father, who mysteriously disappeared.Hillsborough, North Carolina is a town with a dark history, one that was hidden until investigative journalist Laura Chambers pulled it into the light. Nearly a year has passed since her deadly encounter with a serial killer’s twisted progeny, a brutal confrontation that left her physically and emotionally scarred. She’s ready to put the past behind her, but the past has other plans. A woman runs onto the interstate, directly into the path of a truck, and the gruesome accident leaves behind a mangled corpse. Her very last phone call was to Laura, but the victim was barefoot, in a state of undress, and her face is disfigured beyond recognition. Identification seems impossible, and the only thing in her possession is an old photograph depicting Laura, her father—and standing next to them, her imaginary friend from childhood. What else is mistaken about her memories? Laura’s father passed away when she was eight, and she thought she understood why he vanished from her life in the year before he died, but the photograph casts doubt on everything she thought she knew.  As the lines between fact and fiction blur, Laura digs into the history of the deceased, and her own family, determined to discover what lies beneath . . .