Title from cover.

Caroline Cashion, a professor of French literature at Georgetown University, is stunned when an MRI reveals that she has a bullet lodged near the base of her skull. It makes no sense. She has never been shot. When she confronts her parents, they initially profess bewilderment. Then, over the course of one awful evening, she learns the truth. She was adopted when she was three years old, after her real parents were murdered in cold blood. That was thirty-four years ago. Now, Caroline returns to her hometown to learn whatever she can about who her parents were and why they died.