The Name In The Will

A dead woman has left three million dollars to Clara Vale. The problem is that there are two of her. Probate genealogist Nora Hale has spent thirty years finding people who do not want to be found. She is fifty-five, based in Boston, and very good at a job most people have never heard of: proving who somebody actually is. What begins as a routine inheritance case takes her from a silent house on the Maine coast to a terraced street in Liverpool - where two women share the same name, the same birthday, and equally convincing documents proving they are the same person. Neither of them is lying. That is the part Nora cannot get past. One woman was born under that name and can prove it. The other has lived under it since she was four years old, and can prove that. Somewhere between them is a single afternoon in September 1981, and a piece of paper that should never have existed. Then one of them disappears. Someone breaks into Nora's home and steals only the case file. And in a locked attic in Wiscasset, behind a hatch that has been painted shut for forty years, Nora finds two hundred and six letters written by a woman who was never allowed to sign her name. Some families inherit money. Others inherit a lie.