Thanks for having me here today. My name is Deena Wood and I am from Brunswick, Georgia. I’ll be honest, I’ve had a few setbacks over the last year or so. I lost my mother. It was the most devastating pain I’ve ever experienced. Then, I lost my job and if things couldn’t get worse, I finally wised up and realized that my husband was a horrible piece of work. I probably always knew he was, but denied it to myself. Anyway, I’m divorced now and trying to piece my life together.

One day, while I was out driving to clear my head, I stumbled onto the property of Mr. Holcomb Gardner. He was living there with his little dog in a trailer. A beautiful beachfront property along the Atlantic Ocean. But somehow, Mr. Gardner mistook me for someone trying to steal his land. He threatened me with a gun and told me to never return again. I got out of there fast!! So fast that another car nearly hit me, and then started to follow me. Who was Holcomb Gardner?! Even after I left, I couldn’t get the old man off my mind.

I went back a week later and guess what?! Mr. Gardner was gone, along with his dog and his trailer. I’ll admit, I can be a little nosy sometimes. Okay, a LOT NOSY. I started digging into what happened to him and I didn’t like what I was finding out. And to make matters worse, I dragged my father and uncle into the middle of it. But I had to do something. My community and my people were losing their property. I couldn’t stand by and do nothing. But then things really escalated when trouble started to follow me. Weird stuff started happening. Scary stuff.

Stuff that I couldn’t explain nor control.

What You Leave Behind
Genre: Thriller
Release: June 2024
Format: Print, Digital, Audio
Purchase Link

Award-winning author Wanda Morris returns with a powerful, haunting thriller following a lawyer who after the mysterious disappearance of a local landowner and the death of his sister just months before, uncovers a conspiracy that dates back to Reconstruction and persists in half the United States today.

Deena Wood’s life has fallen apart in the aftermath of losing her beloved mother, her marriage, and her prestigious job at an Atlanta law firm. She needs what the Geechee people of coastal Georgia call a “dayclean,” a fresh start.

She returns to her childhood home in Brunswick, Georgia, to heal. But her return is anything but the respite she thought it might be. To make peace with all her loss, she often drives through the city. One day, she unwittingly finds herself on the oceanfront property of a loner widower who is fighting to keep land that has been in his family since the end of the Civil War. He threatens her and warns her to never return. But shortly after, he disappears, and his very expensive property is quickly put up for sale. Curious about what has happened to the man, Deena digs into his disappearance and finds a family legacy at risk. What starts out as a bit of curious snooping, turns into a deadly game of illegal land grabs and property redevelopment in poor and rural communities with dark and powerful forces at work.

Without realizing it, Deena finds herself caught up in a nightmarish scheme that threatens her community and her family. She’ll need help and finds it in a close but unlikely source because she knows she must do whatever it takes to stop the sinister forces at play before she becomes their next target.

About the author
Wanda M. Morris is the acclaimed author of All Her Little Secrets, named as one of the “Best Books of 2021” by Hudson Booksellers and selected as the #1 Top Pick for “Library Reads” by librarians across the country. Her novel, Anywhere You Run, was named One of the Top Ten Crime Fiction Books of 2022 by The New York Times. It has received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Booklist and won an Anthony Award and the Lefty Award for Best Historical Novel of 2023, along with the 2023 Georgia Author of the Year for Mystery. It was also longlisted for the prestigious Mark Twain Voice in American Literature Prize.