Do you think I’m crazy?

Maybe I am. I’m not sure anymore. All I know in my sudden upside-down world is that I have to leave this faculty bathroom stall to teach my freshman creative writing class.

Hold that thought for a sec. I need to take a hit from my inhaler. Anxiety triggers my asthma, you see. What’s worse, it recently reactivated this stupid stutter that I thought I beat back when I was twelve and shipped off to a hideous boarding school after the incident.

I never wrote those threatening letters when I was a kid. I swear.

The one good thing that came out of my experience at the hell-hugger Chatham School for Girls was that I met my lifelong friend, Ava Patel. She’s a bounty hunter, and the only person I trust to figure out what’s causing my recent lost time episodes.

Okay. One puff of my asthma inhaler down. Better. I hope you’re still with me. I, Carly Bennett, swear that every word of this is true.

My life was semi-normal until a week ago. Sunday, I made the LA Times’ “Thirty Under Thirty List” as a rising star University of Southern California professor. Then came Tuesday, when I discovered the dead body of the school’s janitor in my office. It’s been bad enough with the cops circling, But, by Thursday, HE walked back into my life after 15 years.

It’s not what you think. HE is not a past love interest.

HE is Julien White. My former stepbrother.

Julien is older now, 32. And a psychiatrist. Julien is still beautiful and possesses enough charm to convince God to maybe let the Devil back into His good graces.

Believe me. I’ve worked hard to create a normal life for myself. It all started to unspool again a few days ago. That’s when I spotted Julien sitting in the back of my classroom after my students had filtered out.

I know. I should’ve told him to leave or withered what was surely an ersatz expression of contrition from his perfect face. But I did none of it.

How could I? Julien swore he was there to make amends. I didn’t care. Then he dropped the bomb: My mother Emily had believed me after all. And she was going to bring me home from Chatham right before she was murdered.

My mom was everything to me. Still is. When she married Christopher White, my once stepdad, we moved into his Malibu mansion. That’s when everything changed. My mom too.

At first, it seemed like a perfect life with the Whites. Until it wasn’t.

I have to go. My students are waiting for me.

So is Julien. I’m not naive. I know he set me up when we were kids. But he swears he has new information about my mother’s cold case.

After all these years, I ache for the answer. In those quiet moments when I’m alone, the same question haunts me.

Did I kill her?

EVERYONE IS PERFECT HERE
Genre: Domestic Suspense
Release: April 2026
Format: Print, Digital
Amazon | Barnes & Noble

A woman’s life is upended when her past comes back to mess with her mind in this psychological thriller full of twists and turns.

There’s no such thing as perfect.

It’s been fifteen years since Carly Bennett’s mother was brutally murdered during a home robbery. Since then, she’s worked hard to build a normal life with a stellar career as an English professor—far away from the picture-perfect stepfamily that abandoned her at boarding school.

When a male colleague is found dead in Carly’s office—her name scrawled next to his body—everything she’s strived for starts to fall apart. There are eerie similarities to her mother’s attack, and Carly determines to find the truth.

Yet things take a bizarre turn when she suddenly experiences lost time, waking up in strange places, and flashes of dormant memories . . . memories that can’t possibly be real. Because, if they are, then she was there the night her mother was killed.

Could Carly have been responsible? Or is something more sinister at play in her stepfamily’s perfect world . . .?

About the author
Jane Haseldine is a journalist, former crime reporter, columnist, and newspaper editor, and has also worked in politics as the deputy director of communications for a governor. Jane is the author of the Julia Gooden mystery series from Kensington Publishing and her upcoming domestic suspense novel, Everyone is Perfect Here, from Severn House.