Dead Branches

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice. Wren Mallory has spent years untangling other people's bloodlines — matching centimorgans, tracing surnames through crumbling county records, building family trees for strangers who want to know where they came from. She's good at it. Methodical. Quiet. She prefers the data to the people. But when a woman named Patrice Ohlendorf hires Wren to trace her adopted mother's birth family, the results point straight to Harlow's most powerful dynasty — the Voss family, whose name is on half the buildings in town. Two days after Wren delivers her findings, Patrice is found dead in a library parking lot. Then a second DNA match turns up dead on a county road. Now Wren isn't just following a paper trail. She's following bodies. In a small Midwestern town where everyone knows whose grandfather owned whose land, the past is never past. It's just misfiled. Wren — neurodivergent, relentless, and almost constitutionally incapable of leaving a question unanswered — has forty years of buried secrets to uncover before whoever buried them decides she knows too much. Dead Branches is the first audiobook in the Wren Mallory Genealogy Mystery series — a slow-burn cozy mystery for listeners who love a brilliant, unconventional female sleuth, a tight small-town atmosphere, and mysteries that unspool through documents, DNA, and the things families refuse to say out loud. ?? Cozy Mystery ?? Women Sleuth ?? Amateur Sleuth ?? Small Town Mystery ?? Neurodivergent Protagonist ?? Genealogy & DNA Mystery ?? Family Secrets ?? Midwestern Gothic ?? Series Starter