The Lying Woods by Ashley Elston

 

“The truth won’t stay buried.”

“Owen Foster has never wanted for anything. Then his mother shows up at his elite New Orleans boarding school cradling a bombshell: his privileged life has been funded by stolen money. After using the family business, the single largest employer in his small Louisiana town, to embezzle millions and drain the employees' retirement accounts, Owen's father vanished without a trace, leaving Owen and his mother to deal with the fallout.

Owen returns to Lake Cane to finish his senior year, where people he can barely remember despise him for his father's crimes. It's bad enough dealing with muttered insults and glares, but when Owen and his mother receive increasingly frightening threats from someone out for revenge, he knows he must get to the bottom of what really happened at Louisiana Frac--and the cryptic note his father sent him at his boarding school days before disappearing.

Owen's only refuge is the sprawling, isolated pecan orchard he works at after school, owned by a man named Gus who has his own secrets--and in some ways seems to know Owen better than he knows himself. As Owen uncovers a terrible injustice that looms over the same Preacher Woods he's claimed as his own, he must face a shocking truth about his own past--and write a better future.” - taken from Goodreads.com

This was an incredible mystery that begins with why Owen's father embezzled millions of dollars from the company he owned and devastates the small town in Louisiana where they live. Left a cryptic note by his father, Owen arrives home from boarding school to find out his mother is the target of threats. Soon after arriving in town, he stumbles into a part-time job at a pecan farm that his father held when he was Owen’s age. 

The story is told in alternating points of view between present-day Owen and his father Noah when he first arrives in Lake Cane. The mystery soon deepens into something neither Owen nor the reader could have ever imagined. Definitely worth the read.

Visit Ashley Elston’s website.