Two Hundred Strangers

About this book

Paramedic Nora Brandt takes a DNA test and finds a half-sister she never knew, who warns her that something is wrong with all of them and dies in a fire before they can meet. The database shows more than a hundred half-siblings, and they are dying. A conspiracy thriller.

She mailed a DNA test to find out where she came from. The answer is killing her family one stranger at a time.

Nora Brandt is a burned-out paramedic who has spent fifteen years staying calm at other people’s worst moments. When she finally takes a DNA test, the first match is a half-sister she never knew she had, a frightened woman who warns her that something is wrong with all of them, and who burns to death in an “accidental” fire before they can meet.

The database shows Nora dozens of half-siblings, then over a hundred, all conceived at a defunct fertility clinic from a single anonymous “premium” donor. And they are dying, in plausible accidents, in a hidden order, as fast as they surface. Nora is number forty-seven.

To survive, she has to find the man who fathered them all, a powerful figure whose secret a dynasty will erase any number of children to protect, and she has to find him before her number comes up. The only people she can trust are the ones who might be lying. And the only thing that can save two hundred strangers is the one thing the killers cannot allow: the truth, said out loud, where the whole world is watching.

A propulsive, ripped-from-the-headlines conspiracy thriller about identity, chosen family, and the violence of legacy, for readers of fertility-fraud true crime and the page-turning suspense of first-person thrillers you finish in a single sitting.