The Bullet

From former NPR correspondent Mary Louise Kelly comes a heart-pounding story about fear, family secrets, and one woman's hunt for answers about the murder of her parents.Two words: the bullet. That's all it takes to shatter her life.Caroline Cashion is beautiful, intelligent, a professor of French literature. But in a split second, everything she's known is proved to be a lie.A single bullet, gracefully tapered at one end, is found lodged at the base of her skull. Caroline is stunned. It makes no sense: She has never been shot. She has no entry wound, no scar. Then, over the course of one awful evening, she learns the truth: she was adopted when she was three years old, after her real parents were murdered. Caroline was there the night they were attacked. She was wounded too, a gunshot to the neck. Surgeons had stitched up the traumatized little girl, with the bullet still there, nestled deep among vital nerves and blood vessels.That was thirty-four years ago.Now, Caroline has to find the truth of her past. Why were her parents killed? Why is she still alive? She returns to her hometown, where she meets a cop who lets slip that the bullet in her neck is the same bullet that killed her mother—full-metal jacket, .38 Special. It hit Caroline's mother and kept going, hurtling through the mother's chest and into the child hiding behind her.Caroline is horrified—and in danger. When a gun is fired it leaves markings on the bullet, tiny grooves almost as unique as a fingerprint. The bullet in her neck could finger a murderer. Can Caroline unravel the clues to her past before the killer tracks her down?