Brothers David and Jack Dover return to their childhood home, a small community in Arkansas, to bury their father, Brad. 

The brothers are successful, with families of their own.  Yet going home brings not only the anguish of their father’s death, but childhood memories of being raised without their mother.   

Carol Dover was committed to a mental institution when the Dover boys were toddlers.  Blurry snapshots and bits and pieces of information from their father make up the vague and faded memories they have of their mother.  

When David and Jack discover a journal that their father left them, requesting that they read it after his death, an unimaginable secret is revealed.  This long-buried secret cuts to the core of their identities and their lives, and threatens to destroy the bittersweet memories they have of their father.  Can they forgive him? And what really happened to Carol Dover?   

Debbie Steever beautifully captures the precariousness of family ties, the lies we tell one another to protect, and how we resolve those issues.  Steever’s characters are real, the emotional landscape finely crafted, and the storyline superbly written.

 

About the Author

Debbie Steever is a fulltime writer, mother and grandmother.  Ms. Steever is currently working on a fiction book about five best friends growing up in a small community.  She lives with her husband of 42 years in Oklahoma.  Family Secrets or Lies is her first book.