Overview

I Was Dead at the Time begins with eleven-year-old June Holloway realizing that a congressional corruption hearing has turned her into leverage. After Nico Barrera appears at the family home and her parents start arguing about whether the truth is worth their daughter, June reaches a terrifying child-logic conclusion: if she can become unusable, the people leaning on her family lose their pressure point. That decision drives the book into motion. June stages a disappearance around cameras, timing, and the language of panic, steals her father's gun, and forces a southbound road story into existence with Gabe Donnelly caught inside it. The result is part abduction thriller, part strategic vanishing act, and part study in what happens when a child starts reasoning about death as if it were logistics. Around June, the adult world hardens too quickly. Rebecca and Ethan Holloway try to keep a cartel-linked witness-intimidation case alive while their daughter's face becomes national property. Agent Vivian Cruz senses that the neatest explanation is also the most dangerous one. Gabe, meanwhile, is converted almost instantly into the country's preferred monster because the public story needs a driver, a route, and a body even before the facts exist. The novel's title is both literal strategy and moral wound. June does not just disappear; she watches institutions, broadcasters, and prosecutors decide what her death would mean while she is still alive enough to hear it. When she finally reappears, the book detonates its own murder narrative and shifts from chase to aftermath, forcing everyone involved to reckon with the difference between winning a case and repairing a life. By the end, I Was Dead at the Time reads as a political suspense novel about coercion, narrative ownership, and the violence done by systems that prefer a legible story over a true one. It never treats June's plan as clean heroism; it treats it as proof of how badly a child can be cornered by adult power. Tone & Themes High-tension domestic and political suspense driven by child logic and adult fallout Witness intimidation, cartel-linked corruption, and public narrative as weapons Media spectacle turning trauma into property Moral damage without easy innocence or clean villains Systems deciding meaning faster than truth can catch up

Full Product Details

9798259299337

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Tab Content 6

Countries Available