Paranormal psychological suspense — for readers of Jennifer McMahon's The Drowning Kind, Jason Rekulak's Hidden Pictures, and Simone St. James's The Sun Down Motel.

Elena Tate has been sober for twenty years, and she's open about every hard-won day of it. The secret she keeps is stranger than the drinking ever was.

Elena is a Mevvi. She can borrow a bright memory from someone who offers it and carry its warmth into a person who's sick to help them heal. The gift is passed down in her blood, and it comes with one unbreakable rule. You can't borrow without permission. Elena has never let herself use it often, because heavy use took her mother's sight and then her mind. But for months she has been slipping into her teenage daughter's memories while the girl sleeps, telling herself it's love, not theft.

The day Elena picks up her twenty-year coin, a woman from her Friday-night meeting is murdered in the alley behind the group's gathering place. The only thing that can tell her what really happened is the gift she swore she'd stop using—one that's turning on her now and becoming harder to manage.

The closer Elena gets to who killed her friend, the closer she gets to the secrets her own family buried a generation ago.

Book One of The Borrowing Series. The cost is in the keeping.

Content notes: alcoholism and recovery, central and on the page; the murder of an adult woman; a mother entering her teenage daughter's memories without consent; a parent's loss of sight and cognitive decline.

Michelle Melton is a former crime-and-courts journalist and a friend of Bill's since 2004. Themes of recovery run through all of her books. The Sickness of Secrets is her debut novel.