Mad Honey

When a teenage girl is found dead in a small New Hampshire town, two families are pulled into a spiral of suspicion, secrets, and grief that forces everyone to confront what they thought they knew about love and truth. Mad Honey centers on Olivia and her son Asher, newly arrived after escaping a violent marriage, and Lily, a girl trying to live openly and freely in a community not always ready for her. Their stories are bound together by a fragile romance — and then by tragedy. Picoult and Boylan don't just ask whodunit; they ask how well any of us really know the people we love, and what we're willing to believe when it matters most.

What sets this novel apart is its dual-author, dual-voice structure: Picoult writes Olivia and Asher, Boylan writes Lily and her mother, and the seam between them is nearly invisible. The result is a book with genuine interiority — each narrator feels inhabited rather than constructed. The mystery mechanics are tightly controlled, but the emotional current running underneath them is what keeps the pages turning. This is a novel about cycles of harm, the courage it takes to be seen, and how the same event can look entirely different depending on where you're standing when it happens.