The Last Name on the List

Lise Hollis finds missing heirs for a living. She has never once looked properly at her own family.

Then a letter arrives from a notary. Lise's great-uncle Ambrose, the soft-hearted shopkeeper the family remembers as a generous fool, has left three acres of land and a ruined shop, and a developer wants to buy them. Every heir must sign before the deadline. Lise's aunts and cousins start counting the money.

But the first name on the list is not one of theirs. It belongs to Fabien Charlery, a son nobody has ever mentioned, and if he is alive, he inherits everything. Aunt Marcelle calls him a thief. Aunt Rosalie, who gives everything away, goes very quiet. And Lise's mother, whose recent memories are slipping away, is holding on tight to the oldest ones.

As Lise follows the trail through a shop ledger kept in pencil, a bundle of letters nobody was meant to read and forty-five years of silence, she begins to understand that every family keeps its own books, and that some debts are paid to the wrong person for a lifetime.

Warm, wise and quietly devastating, The Last Name on the List is a story about inheritance in every sense of the word: what we owe each other, what we choose not to know and the courage it takes to finally ask.