70 pages 2 hours read

My Sister's Grave

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014

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Chapters 17-29Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness, death, death by suicide, and substance use.

Chapter 17 Summary

Tracy enters the vacant First National Bank building in Cedar Grove, which now houses the law office of her childhood friend Dan O’Leary. They reminisce about their youth and Sarah, with Tracy recalling Sarah’s kindness. Dan discusses experiencing burnout after practicing law in Boston, Massachusetts, and he reflects on his wife’s infidelity as well as his father’s death. He notes that afterward, he returned to Cedar Grove to care for his sick mother, who died just six months ago. Tracy shares her own strained family relationships and reveals that she became a homicide detective specifically to investigate Sarah’s murder. She presents Dan with her case file on Edmund House.


In a flashback to seven weeks after Sarah vanished, Sheriff Calloway tells Tracy’s father, James, that a new witness, a traveling salesman named Ryan Hagen, saw a truck matching House’s vehicle on the same night his daughter went missing. Tracy questions the witness’s credibility during this conversation, but her father dismisses her concerns, eager to obtain new information that could lead to a search warrant.

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