GNOSSIENNES
Megan Hawkes stopped playing piano the night her best friend Katherine Clover was found in the drainage culvert on Maplewood Avenue. Twenty-five years later, genealogical DNA gives the Knoxville Police Department the lead it never had—identifying a suspect tied to Katie’s fetal DNA. But when Megan opens Katie’s evidence box she finds something worse than a breakthrough: the girl’s diary has four pages torn clean from its spine. Pulled into a task force she cannot lead, Megan is forced to watch others sign warrants and give press conferences while she pieces together the theft that silenced Katie in life and death. When a confession surfaces, the truths it reveals will save some families—and destroy others. Megan must decide whether to turn the confession over to a system that prizes transparency over mercy, or bury it to protect innocents—while knowing either choice will leave bodies in its wake. Tense, elegiac, and morally wrenching, this is a novel about grief that becomes identity, the cold calculus of justice, and the ways music and memory can hold what the law cannot.
D.J. Brooks's GNOSSIENNES — Tense, elegiac, and morally wrenching, this is a novel about grief that becomes identity, the cold calculus of justice, and the ways music and memory can hold what the law cannot.The first Megan Hawkes and Luc Phan novel.Available Late Summer — 2026