Retired public librarian Rachel Lyons took early retirement three years before, going into business with her husband as private investigators. While she was on a hike with a group of conservationists looking for life after a forest fire, she stumbled across a body of a man she first thought had died in the fire. When she noticed a bullet hole in his leg, she wasn’t so sure how he died.

A few days later, Rachel was searching for a quilting group in order to share her love of quilting with others. Noting a lack of groups even after searching the internet, she decided that modern young women must not have time to quilt by hand. While she was thinking about recent events, the phone rang. A woman at the other end of the line said she had heard Rachel was looking for a quilting group and invited her to a monthly bee, an all-nighter the next Saturday night. The group’s name was The Quilted Secrets.

When Rachel attended the next meeting, she found the group consisted of women of all ages from their teens into their 80s and 90s. The strange spoken and unspoken interactions among the women caused Rachel to question her attendance, while the talk of deaths and the secrets surrounding them drew her curiosity. By the end of the evening she realized she was there for a reason. Little did Rachel know how far down a dark path that first Saturday night quilting bee would lead her.

Just like Rachael, author Barbara Sullivan is a retired librarian after twenty-five years in the field. Also a quilter, she writes with a deep-seated understanding of what secrets quilts can carry. She smoothly draws the reader into the dark secrets that haunt the Stowall family, filling pages with the same tension that fills the rooms where bizarre and troubling conversations occur among the characters in her novel.

Unraveling Ava, a Quilted Mystery Novel, is a troubling story of family history and family secrets. The physical, mental, and emotional pain of those secrets are palpable even to the reader. This is not an easy book to read, but it is one that is also difficult to leave even for a few moments. Ada and the rest of the Stowall family have a long history woven into the fabric of time that begins to unravel as eventually do the threads of a quilt.

The author assures us that these same characters will again appear in her writings, and we welcome their continued story. Unraveling Ada is available for purchase at Amazon.com.

A special thank you goes to Barbara Sullivan for providing a complimentary copy of Unraveling Ada for our review.