How far will a daughter go to protect her mother when the truth about the past could destroy them both?
Cullie Sims has spent much of her life wondering whether she exists by accident or design.
She knows the circumstances of her conception. Her mother, Katie, became pregnant after being sexually assaulted as a teenager by five local men.
Now a high-school senior, Cullie learns that her biological father has died and left her an inheritance worth nearly a million dollars.
But someone else wants the money.
Riley Radford, Cullie’s half-sister, possesses evidence connected to events from three years earlier—evidence she claims could send Katie to prison for the rest of her life.
Her demand is simple:
Cullie gives up the inheritance, or Riley exposes what she knows.
When threats turn violent, Cullie finds herself caught between protecting her mother, discovering what really happened in the past, and deciding how much she is willing to risk for the truth.
The question that has followed her for years—Why am I here?—begins taking on a different meaning.
Beneath the Story
The Boaz Seeker is a mystery about identity, family loyalty, truth, inheritance, justice, and the consequences of choices made by one generation for the next.
It asks:
- How much does the story of our beginnings determine who we become?
- What does a child owe a parent who has committed serious wrongdoing?
- Can protecting someone we love require us to hide the truth?
- What happens when justice for one person threatens destruction for another?
- How much responsibility do children inherit for the choices their parents made?
- When loyalty and conscience point in different directions, which should prevail?
Cullie is searching for more than a way out of Riley’s threat.
She is trying to understand who she is, what she owes her mother, and whether protecting the people we love can ever justify becoming part of their secrets.
About the Novel
Genre: Mystery / Psychological Suspense / Southern Fiction
Setting: Boaz, Alabama
Author: Richard L. Fricks
Part of: The Boaz Novels
Related Novel: The Boaz Schoolteacher
From Richard
The Boaz Seeker continues questions that began in The Boaz Schoolteacher, but this time the consequences belong largely to the next generation.
Cullie did not choose the circumstances of her conception, the violence that preceded her birth, or the decisions her mother later made. Yet she has to live inside the consequences of all of them.
That interested me.
The novel explores what happens when children inherit more than names, property, and family histories. Sometimes they inherit secrets, unresolved wrongs, and moral choices they never asked to make.
At the center of Cullie’s story is a difficult question: how far should we go to protect someone we love when protecting them may require us to compromise what we believe is right?
