Alyssa Bresnahan

“Masterfully woven…The Map of True Places is a gripping quest for truth that kept me reading at the edge of my seat to the very last page.”
—Lisa Genova, author of Still Alice

Brunonia Barry, author of the beloved New York Times and international bestseller The Lace Reader is back with The Map of True Places, an emotionally resonant novel of tragedy, secrets, identity, and love.

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"When Patricia Delfine was six years old, a wounded bird led her deep into the forest to the Parliament of Birds, where she met the Great Tree and was asked a question that would determine the course of her life. When Laurence Armstead was in grade school, he cobbled together a wristwatch-sized device that could send its wearer two seconds into the future. When Patricia and Laurence first met in high school, they didn't understand one another at all....

No one ever paid attention to the faces of missing children on milk cartons. But as Janie  Johnson glanced at the face of the little girl who had been taken twelve years ago, she recognized that little girl—it was herself.
The mystery of the kidnapping is unraveled, but the nightmare is not over. The Spring family wants justice, but who is to blame? It's difficult to figure out what's best for everyone.
Janie Johnson or Jennie Spring?...

Night Work
Kate and her partner, Al Hawkin, are called to a scene of carefully executed murder: the victim is a muscular man, handcuffed and strangled, a stun gun's faint burn on his chest and candy in his pocket. The likeliest person to want him dead, his often-abused wife, is meek and frail—and has an airtight alibi. Kate and Al are stumped, until a second body turns up—also zapped, cuffed, and strangled...and carrying a candy bar....

The kidnapping is long past. Janie Johnson can never change what happened to her or to the families that love her. But finally life seems to be settling down for the Springs and the Johnsons.
The worst part of this new life for Janie is that Reeve Shields is away at college. Janie misses him terribly, no matter how many e-mails they send each other. As for Reeve, he's finding life at college overwhelming. He goes to work at the school radio station,...

At first, NYPD detective Kathleen Mallory thinks the case is simple: a burglar caught in the act and stabbed with an ice pick by a vulnerable homeowner. Except that the dead man was not a burglar, but a hired killer. And the homeowner is the most famous missing child in NYPD history, believed kidnapped more than sixty years ago after the massacre of her entire family...by an ice pick. As Mallory investigates, an astonishing story emerges, one of murderous...

Peyton Shields had always wanted to be a doctor, and now, thanks to her relentless drive, stellar academic credentials, and a mountain of debt to Harvard Medical School, she's a first-year resident at a major Boston children's hospital. The hours are impossibly long but it's the life she wants, complete with a husband who's an up-and-coming young lawyer. But a late-night drive home in a heavy snowstorm changes everything. A car coming straight at...

Some say the great mystery of how one can live in two worlds at once died with Thomas Hunter many years ago. Still others that the gateway to that greater reality was and is only the stuff of dreams. They are all wrong. Rachelle Matthews, who grew up in the small town of Eden, Utah, discovered just how wrong when she dreamed and awoke in another world. There she learned that she was the 49th Mystic, the prophesied one, tasked with finding five ancient...

Eva, eighteen, and Nell, seventeen, are sisters, adolescents on the threshold of womanhood - and for them anything should be possible. But suddenly their lives are turned upside down, their dreams pushed into the shadows, as sickness and anarchy rage across a country on the brink of collapse. In a time of supsicion and superstition, of anger, hunger, and fear, Eva and Nell are left to forage through the forest, and their past, for the keys to survival....

"Swedish Lapland, 1717. Maija, her husband Paavo and her daughters Frederika and Dorotea arrive from their native Finland, hoping to forget the traumas of their past and put down new roots in this harsh but beautiful land. Above them looms Blackåsen, a mountain whose foreboding presence looms over the valley and whose dark history seems to haunt the lives of those who live in its shadow. While herding the family's goats on the mountain, Frederika...