An Ocean State Novel Series

A girl goes missing in a Rhode Island beach community, leaving everyone to wonder: Is there a monster among us? From the bestselling author of Her One Regret.

July 1979: The people of Bonnet Shores Beach Club are shaken to their core when local twelve-year-old Christina Grove doesn’t come home one night. The tight-knit community is still reeling from a series of home invasions that plagued them last summer, and this new incident shatters their hope of a fresh start. Christina’s older sister, Maddie, takes the disappearance especially hard and blames herself for sending her little sister home alone through the woods on her bike.

Everyone shows up to help find the missing girl: from Bonnet royalty—like Joan Mancini, whose husband’s family owns the beach club—to working-class neighbors who pick up donuts and coffee for the search parties. Maddie Grove has suspicions of her own that lead her to take ever more dangerous risks despite her mother’s fears of losing a second daughter. Meanwhile, another local, Cricket Kelly, takes it upon herself to investigate the unsavory characters of Bonnet in an attempt to both find Christina and come to terms with her own teenage trauma.

The Groves’ neighbor, twenty-one-year-old criminal justice student Diana González is just getting her start working part-time at the Narragansett Police Department and jumps in to help with Christina’s case. Diana knows there’s more to Bonnet than carefree nights of flashlight tag and bonfires up in the dunes, and she suspects an ugly reality: This isn’t a case of a childhood runaway. Someone who pitched in to help with the search for Christina is likely responsible for her disappearance.

A riveting story about lost childhood, female friendship, trauma, and redemption, the second Ocean State Novel takes a hard look at violence against women and girls in a beach town where the wolves are always circling.

From the author of the book club favorite The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano comes a riveting feminist thriller that tackles an unspeakable taboo: regretting motherhood.

When successful Rhode Island real estate agent Lucy Mendoza vanishes, leaving her baby behind in a grocery store parking lot, the news quickly makes national headlines. Lucy’s best friend, Michelle, is devastated, and terrified that Lucy’s life is at stake. But she knows something that could complicate the police investigation. Lucy had confessed something unspeakable: She regretted becoming a mother, so much that she’d fantasized about faking her own kidnapping. If the police and media were to find out, Lucy would become a monster in public opinion. Michelle is sure Lucy would never abandon her daughter. But could she be wrong? Could Lucy have been so desperate she chose to escape her life?

Donna Freitas has drawn from groundbreaking research to bring readers this unforgettable novel. Her One Regret is at once a pulse-pounding feminist thriller, a moving depiction of the realities of motherhood, and a rich exploration of a subject our culture and society have rendered nearly verboten: the possibility that for some women, motherhood is an unfixable mistake.