Bone Memory

A dead woman. An impossible date. A record someone expected to stay buried.In 1972, a woman's body comes down the Mississippi River carrying a contradiction: official records say Loretta Mae Johnson died months earlier.Dr. Simone Odile Baptiste recognizes the surgical scars-and a paper trail that should not exist. Following Loretta's name into Mississippi, Simone and her husband, Zeke Thibodeaux, uncover falsified death records, coerced sterilizations, hidden testimony, and an archive built to survive the institutions determined to erase it.But evidence has an owner.As Simone gathers files, testimony, and the fragments others risked their lives to preserve, she is forced to confront a question more dangerous than who committed the harm: who has the right to preserve another person's pain, and who gets to decide what happens to the record next?Set against 1972 Louisiana and Mississippi, Bone Memory is a historical literary suspense novel about medical racism, institutional power, family, memory, and the people who refuse to let the record disappear.Bone Memory is Book Two of The Crossroads Legacy and can be read as a complete standalone novel.