The Ones They Called Home: An American family, a remote Scottish village, and homecoming that should never have happened

They crossed an ocean to find where they came from. They should never have come home.Grace Kincaid has never quite belonged anywhere. So when she traces her family's roots to Balnakyle-a remote village at the head of a Scottish Highland glen-she brings her husband, her teenage daughter, and her elderly aunt across the Atlantic to stand, at last, in the place that bears their name.The welcome is warm. Too warm. And then too watchful.The villagers know the Kincaids before they introduce themselves. A "remembrance" is approaching, and the whole glen is counting down to it. There is one road in, no phone signal, and a black loch that the locals say keeps what it's given. And every time Grace says her own name, something moves behind the villagers' eyes that a homecoming should never stir.Grace is a historian. She trusts records over smiles-and the records tell a very different story than the warm one she was given. Her family are not the lost children of this glen. They are the blood of the man who betrayed it. And the village has been waiting one hundred and seventy years for a Kincaid to come home.As the road floods behind them and the "remembrance" draws near, Grace uncovers the truth one unbearable piece at a time: why they were really lured here, what happened to the last person who came asking questions-and exactly what the village intends to do, on the anniversary, to the youngest of them.To save her daughter, Grace will have to face a whole community bound by an ancient wound-and the one thing she brought with her that no one can take away: the truth, said out loud, at the one moment it cannot be smoothed away.A grounded, jaw-dropping psychological thriller about roots, guilt, and belonging-perfect for readers of Catriona Ward, Ruth Ware, Jane Harper, and Sarah Pearse.The Ones They Called Home is a standalone novel. Marion Boyle's thrillers can be read in any order."An unputdownable roots-trap thriller-the twist reframes everything, and it's completely fair."