Blood Count

Numbers don't lie. Families do.

Forensic accountant Daphne Whitfield makes her living reading what money says when people aren't watching. She is an expert at uncovering embezzlement, tax fraud, and corporate deception, relying on the cold, hard truth of mathematics. But when an anonymous letter alleges financial irregularities within her parents' prestigious charitable foundation, Daphne's latest audit brings her back to her childhood home in Saratoga Springs.

What begins as a routine review quickly unravels into a staggering discovery: a flawless trail of $4,200 quarterly payments extending back thirty-six years. The money flows from a memorial trust dedicated to her cousin, Oliver, who tragically drowned in a local lake at the age of three. But as Daphne follows the financial breadcrumbs to a quiet bungalow in Brattleboro, Vermont, she realizes the lake was ankle-deep that summer, the death certificate was falsified, and the dead boy is very much alive.

At the center of this decades-long conspiracy is Daphne's mother, Margot-a formidable matriarch who engineered a fake death, a shell corporation, and a web of silence to protect a devastating family secret. As Daphne dismantles the architecture of her mother's fraud, she is forced to question every truth she was raised to believe, including the biological reality of her own parentage.