Three sisters reunite on a family vacation and rekindle their relationship the only way they know how—by covering each other’s tracks in a real-life murder mystery not even they can figure out.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Amelia Diane Coombs’ Drop Dead Sisters, which is out November 1st 2024.
Remi Finch has spent the better part of her adult life avoiding family—especially her sisters. They just don’t click. Besides, her unconventional upbringing and major anxiety have convinced Remi that she can’t build a relationship with anyone. Period.
When her parents plan a family reunion camping trip to celebrate their anniversary, Remi’s willing to reconnect, if only because she doesn’t have a choice. But then a dead body turns up at their campsite, and their sisterly bonding kicks into high gear.
No one knows the whole story, but the Finch women are prepared to cover up the pieces before anyone tries to put them together. It’s a precautionary measure, probably unnecessary. Nobody else was there, so how could they have seen anything?
Between old grudges and new dynamics, a handsome park ranger, and a body that won’t stay hidden, Remi is about to learn that nothing strengthens family ties quite like crime.
Chapter One
July 3 / Early Evening
If you have an older sister, there’s a good chance that she’s almost killed you at least once since childhood. Maybe not intentionally—or hey, maybe it was intentional—but between pretending you’re a life-size doll and generally neglecting you during Friday-night babysitting, it happened. Trust me, it happened, but you survived. Which, more or less, was the motto of my childhood. Shit happened and you didn’t die. Best of luck with your trauma and therapy bills.
My first memory of Eliana and Maeve accidentally almost killing me was from when I was five. Maeve was ten. Eliana was thirteen. We were playing hide-and-seek on our grandparents’ farm in Humboldt County, and before the game began, my sisters “whispered” about how the best hiding spot was outside the farm, past the back gate. So, off I went when it was my turn to hide. And straight into the pot farm next door. The security guard found me before my sisters did, pointed his shotgun at the stack of fertilizer I’d been crouching behind, and barked for me to get out. I peed my pants.
Mom and Dad grounded my sisters for a week.
Seems lenient, in hindsight.
Then there was the time they insisted I cook dinner when they were babysitting, and I almost burned down our kitchen—with me in it. Once, Eliana locked me in her car during the summer; horrifying, considering she’s now the mother of two. Another time, Maeve decided to test if my pediatrician was right and I was actually allergic to avocados; I had to go to the emergency room. Those are the highlights. I’m sure there are dozens of other accidental almost-murders that my childhood memory has repressed.
I only see my sisters for holidays, graduations, and the rare Finch family medical emergency. This is on purpose—not because we hate one another, because hate is an actual emotion you would need to have toward another person. No, we’re indifferent to one another, which I sometimes think is worse. Doesn’t help that Eliana and Maeve are a mere three years apart, and I have five- and eight-year age gaps with them. I’m perpetually the youngest, something no one ever lets me forget.
My car hits a pothole as I merge off the freeway and curve along a pine-shadowed road, following the forest-green road signs for Fallen Lake State Park. Camping. Why did my parents have to pick camping to celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary? As an introverted workaholic with an intolerance for family bonding, I’ve never been camping with my family. Never had the desire—or death wish—to strand myself in the wilderness with the entire Finch family, both sisters included. Until this weekend.
I shouldn’t be surprised about the locale, though. My parents are hippies. Weed-smoking, Birkenstock-wearing free spirits who sold my childhood home the minute my dad retired, used the money to buy an RV, and took off across the United States and parts of Canada. Their honeymoon was a twenty-day backpacking trip in Yosemite, so maybe I should be thankful we’re just camping. Just camping sounds like an oxymoron inside my head, but I drove five hours and cashed in three days’ worth of precious vacation time. Might as well try to enjoy it.
My therapist thinks my less-than-traditional childhood is how I ended up in the blandest soul-eating job on earth: community manager for Warp, a popular online video game company. I’m the one who reads all those angry emails your nephew sends at one in the morning when his Rift of the Realms account gets locked for profanity.
I’ve made great life choices.
Life choices that have been coming back to haunt me lately. Yesterday, I received a job offer from my old college roommate Tasha. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t go to college to learn the art of managing an incel’s anger issues. I studied graphic design, and Tasha—who fundraised over $4 million to launch Soft Cat Interactive in Seattle—handed me a shiny new job offer on a plate.
Most people would celebrate. Chug champagne with one hand while emailing their letter of resignation with the other. But all I did was panic-reply to Tasha that I’d be out of town camping until the following week and I’d get back to her later. Then I spent three straight hours googling how risky start-ups are and reading articles about how moving is considered a “life stressor.”
Thanks, but no thanks. I have enough life stressors as it is.
I appreciate Tasha’s offer, but I don’t see myself packing up and leaving San Jose. Voluntarily moving closer to Eliana, who lives in Seattle, was never on my adulthood bingo card. Maeve and I live six hours away from one another, and it’s a nice buffer, but I enjoy keeping a state line, minimum, between Eliana and me. As deeply unenthused as I am about a long weekend of camping with my family, it should be a welcome distraction from the career anxiety (does it count as a career if I’ve been at the same dead-end job for over five years?) and the constant low-level hum of what my therapist jokingly calls my millennial ennui, which has only gotten exponentially worse the closer I creep to my thirtieth birthday.
Fallen Lake finally comes into view outside the passenger window: dark waters lapping up against docks and rock sand beaches, with a backdrop of peaked mountains with torched trees from last year’s fires. I’ve never been before, but my parents love Fallen Lake. Mom spent her childhood summers here, and my parents often stay in the campground when they make their way down along the West Coast to visit our scattered family. From Seattle to visit Eliana to Los Angeles to visit Maeve, with me sandwiched somewhere in between, in the armpit of Northern California: San Jose.
I drive through the downtown to reach the campground. The small tourist town is made up of Mexican restaurants, run-down motels with flickering vacancy signs, a sporting goods store, the occasional frilly bed-and-breakfast, an upscale art gallery, and a Dairy Queen. Mom describes Fallen Lake as charming, but I don’t see the appeal.
I flick on my blinker and slow, turning in to Fallen Lake State Park. The entrance is a glorified dirt parking lot surrounded by crooked pine trees. A row of six cabins sits on the far side of the parking lot—lodging for the rangers, if I had to guess—and a few haphazardly placed parking cones steer me toward a cabin-style check-in kiosk. An open shed is on the other side, stacked full of firewood for sale, and a sign beside it lectures visitors about campfire safety, which just makes me think about s’mores.
Okay, this trip might have one upside, because I do enjoy a good s’more.
I park beside the kiosk and roll down my window, then lean into the back seat to check on Buffy, my Cavalier King Charles spaniel, who whines in anticipation. Someone is not a fan of long car rides, and I can’t say I blame her. “Almost there, girl,” I tell her, and scratch her floppy ears.
As I wait for the ranger, I inhale the pine-fresh air that’s supposedly good for my mental health, but I’m not any calmer on the exhale. Probably because something like three hundred people a year die in state parks. What can I say? I’m an almost-thirty-year-old white woman who lives alone. I listen to a lot of true crime podcasts.
“Checking in?” The ranger ducks to peer into my open window. He’s tall, early thirties, dressed in a green khaki uniform, dark hair curling around his earlobes, sunglasses pushed on top of his head.
“Yeah, last name Finch. Campsite 34. I think.”
“You think?” The ranger smiles, and if I weren’t oozing dread from my pores over seeing my entire family, I might appreciate that smile more. It’s a good smile, dimples and all.
“The perils of having your disorganized parents book your camping trip,” I say. “My mom said she’d send the reservation confirmation but never did.”
“Hey, no worries,” the ranger says with a chuckle. “Can confirm you’re in Campsite 34. I checked in your parents earlier.”
“Mmm,” I say with a nod. “My condolences.”
This earns me yet another smile, and s’mores might not be the only good thing about this trip. If I’d known park rangers were this hot, maybe I would’ve gone camping years ago.
“Your sites are in the Buckeye campground,” Mr. Hot Park Ranger is saying now, and he passes me a highlighted camp map through my window, along with a slip of paper with a piece of painter’s tape dangling off the edge. “Just follow the highlighted route. And here’s your parking permit; place this in the driver’s side of your windshield.”
I stick the piece of paper to my windshield, then glance at the map. Yikes. This campground is big. Rather than contemplate my mortality and odds of getting chainsaw murdered in a state park, I smile at the ranger. “Thanks.”
Mr. Hot Park Ranger taps the roof of my car twice before saying “Happy camping” and moving on to the next car in line.
I follow the highlighted route on my map to the cluster of campsites my family rented, and seven minutes later, I’m pulling into the paved parking spot at Campsite #34. I pop open the car and duck out, every bone and muscle groaning as if I’m sixty, not twenty-nine. But I only stopped once, at the In-N-Out in Davis, and my entire lower body fell asleep an hour ago.
“Hey, good girl,” I coo at Buffy as I open the back door and unclip her harness from the safety seat. I lower her onto the ground, then attach her leash to my belt loop. Buffy stretches out her back legs, then looks up at me with her expectant puppy face, tail thumping.
Hot Californian sun sizzles against my pale indoor-person skin.
Damn it. I forgot sunscreen.
I brought ten cans of prescription dog food but forgot sunscreen.
“Remi!” Mom’s campsite is beside mine, and she’s seated beneath a giant sunshade lofted over a wooden picnic table. Her blonde hair is roped back in a braid, streaked with grays, and she’s wearing cargo shorts and a T-shirt from the San Diego Zoo with a giant cartoon ostrich on it. She waves her arms above her head like I’m on the other side of a Target parking lot, not thirty feet away. Yes, I was embarrassed to be seen with her in high school.
Buffy strains at her leash, eyeballing all the squirrels and birds and random humans, as we walk over to my parents’ site.
My parents booked five sites in a row for the long weekend, near a bathroom that’s tucked among the trees. I sag with relief when I spot that squat brick building. No chance that I’d pee in a ditch. I do have a line, and ditch peeing is it. But, as Buffy drags my reluctant body toward Mom, I mentally count the number of people attending this weekend and frown. Unless the numbers have changed, we’re two campsites short. Meaning an unlucky few will be grouping up.
Ten bucks and a case of prescription dog food that those unlucky few are me, Eliana, and Maeve. The last time I was in the same room—or general space, indoor or outdoor, breathing the same air—with the both of them was at my college graduation. Seven years ago. Eliana has a family. Maeve travels a lot for work. And I’m . . . me.
If our lives were a video game, we each adventured off on our own side quests nearly a decade ago and never returned to the main storyline.
Great. This is going to be great.
Mom hops up from the picnic bench and rushes over to me before I can reach their sunshade, enveloping me in a bear hug.
“Oh, baby.” Mom smooshes her lips to my cheek and sways me back and forth like a rag doll, or one of those wacky blow-up tube men set up outside used car dealerships.
“Hey, Mom.” I extricate myself from her hold and readjust my glasses, my smile mostly genuine. Even if I’d prefer reading death threats from fourteen-year-olds (yes, this happens) instead of camping, I need to pretend like I want to be here. Because I love my parents, even if they’re weird and embarrassing. Against all odds, they’ve stuck together for forty years, and though I’m far from a romantic, we should celebrate that.
Or, at the very least, acknowledge it with a grocery store sheet cake and some balloons.
“How was the drive?” Mom kneels down to scrub Buffy on the head, the dog’s tail thumping ecstatically.
“Long. Traffic was gross.” I moved to San Jose after college. Before my parents sold the house and became transient seniors, we lived outside Eureka, California. San Jose was enough distance between me and my hometown to feel independent, but not too far away to make visiting inconvenient.
Mom beams; then she hooks her arm through mine and leads me to their campsite. Their trusty RV—which they named Atlas, like they’re a teenage boy with his first car—takes up the entire parking bay, and the solar panels mounted on the roof glint beneath the sun. The RV is ancient, and my parents tried to make it as eco-friendly as possible, remodeling it with a waste-grease fueling system. The door creaks open, and Dad clomps down the stairs, wearing an outfit nearly identical to Mom’s. His shirt has a meerkat on it.
I wave to Dad, then say, “But all in all, not too terrible. A little boring. No offense to Buffy.”
I listened to a four-part podcast series on flesh-eating bacteria. Riveting. And I’m not being sarcastic. The podcast kept my brain occupied enough to forget about Tasha’s job offer and this trip for five hours. Was that the smartest thing to listen to before going camping on a lake? Probably not, but I’m not known for well-informed decision-making.
Dad reaches us and pulls me in for a hug—and into a cloud of citronella, all-natural bug spray that he must’ve coated himself with. “You need to hit the road more often, Rem. Does wonders for the mind.” At this, he taps the side of his balding head.
“I’ll do my best,” I say with an awkward laugh. Because my parents like to act as if I don’t have a full-time job and we live in a society where one week of vacation a year is a privilege. See: free spirit hippie parents who don’t understand student loan debt and the importance of a decent credit score.
Dad tousles my hair, mussing my dirty-blonde waves, then heads to the ice chests inside the open bear-proof bin. “We’re grilling up some portobello mushroom burgers for dinner,” he calls over his shoulder, and I refrain from making a joke about my parents doing shrooms.
Because they did once, when I was in high school. On my prom night.
Mom nods toward a few camping chairs encircling the campfire, and I follow. “Hey, um,” I say, and glance over to my campsite, “is anyone else staying at my site? I’m trying to figure out where to put my tent.”
“We could only get five sites,” Mom says, like that’s an explanation. “It’ll be nice, won’t it? Catching up with your sisters?”
My mostly genuine smile falters. “Did you run this plan by Eliana and Maeve?”
“It’s my anniversary weekend, and I want you three girls to get along. Just think, Rem, of how wonderful it’ll be! You three can stay up and roast s’mores, fill each other in on your lives, talk about your dreams—”
I snort at her kumbaya fantasy, and Mom’s face falls. “Sorry, but did you confuse us for your other three daughters who all get along?”
“Breaks my heart,” Mom says with a sway of her head, “that you’re not closer to your sisters. One day, your dad and I won’t be here anymore, and your sisters will be all you have.”
Oh, cool, she’s going the emotional “someday I’ll be dead” manipulation route. That’s a low blow, even for our mom. “Seriously—”
“Try for me,” she interrupts and grabs my hands, holding them within hers. “Your sisters haven’t always made it easy for you, but you are all adults now. Times change, so change with them.”
“You sound like the inside of a fortune cookie,” I tell her, and Mom smiles, as if that was a compliment and not a dig at her crackpot wisdom. “But fine, sure, whatever, I’ll try. Remember that this is a two—no, three-way street we’re talking about. I’m not the issue.”
Mom raises a pencil-thin brow, as if calling BS on my entire statement.
“Not . . . the only issue,” I amend, and the brow lowers.
“Attagirl.” Mom pats my cheek before reclining back in her chair; I’m disturbed how similar her tone of voice is to mine when I praise my dog for not eating out of the trash can.
No, the three of us have never gotten along, and despite my mom’s delusions, I don’t expect that to change this weekend. I never sat my sisters down when I was younger and asked why they didn’t like me, but I can hazard a few guesses. I was an anxious kid, annoying at the best of times, a brat at the worst. Eliana and Maeve—while radically different in personality—had this closeness I could never, ever infiltrate, no matter how hard I tried. The fact that I tried, embarrassingly hard, was what annoyed them the most. I was a shadow, an echo, that they couldn’t wait to escape when they left for college.
My sisters never understood me, which isn’t a crime, but their general disinterest in ever trying to understand me as an adult bothers me more than I’d like to admit. I almost wish we’d had some big fight, something I could point to as the reason for why we fell apart, but the truth is that we were never together to begin with.
Also, no matter how much my parents deny it, they each have a favorite. All parents do. They might love their children equally, but there’s always one kid they prefer spending time with. The one kid whose absence is missed during holidays and vacations, who gets the more personal gifts for their birthday, not to mention casual texts throughout the week.
Maeve’s always been Dad’s favorite. Like our dad, Maeve’s idealistic, a dreamer. And our mom’s always loved Eliana slightly more than the rest of us. Maybe it’s because Eliana was the firstborn, or because she has the picture-perfect life, or the fact that she made our mom a grandmother. Who knows.
If I want to be fair, it’s technically not their fault for being our parents’ favorites—that’s all on Mom and Dad for their poor choice in offspring—but sometimes I wonder if the fact that my sisters had our parents to themselves for years before I came along made it impossible for me to ever catch up.
A fancy minivan inches along the one-way road that encircles the campsites, as if reading each and every plastic tag attached to the posts by the car and RV stalls. No doubt looking for Campsite #34. I squint through the glare on my glasses and catch sight of my oldest sister in the driver’s seat. She drove, even though it’s a twelve-hour trek from Washington, but Eliana has always had an irrational fear of flying. If you ask me, I think she has an irrational fear of any situation where she can’t be in complete control.
Mom spots the minivan a moment after me and perks up in her lounger.
“That must be Eliana. She made great time!” Mom smiles as she groans to her feet, and I swear her smile is wider, more joyful, than the one she wore when I arrived. I deflate, ever so slightly, since I barely had fifteen minutes with my parents before one of my sisters showed up.
I hang behind as my mom walks across her campsite and into mine, waiting as Eliana parks her minivan beside my sedan. I tear my gaze from her arrival and drop my head back, staring up at the sky as the sun slides like yolk to the west. It’s just a long weekend, I remind myself, barely seventy-two hours.
I survived an entire childhood with Eliana and Maeve. Three days is nothing.
Like my mom said. We’re all adults now.
Allegedly.
Eliana’s a mom now. Surely, she’s grown up and stopped being a judgmental shrew. And Maeve’s always been in her own materialistic world, a borderline narcissist. And me? Who knows what they say about me. Probably something like how I’m the Finch sister who never met her potential and whose anxiety coping mechanisms are crying in the bathroom or collapsing in on herself like a dying star.
They wouldn’t be wrong.
Between my extended family and various family friends, we don’t really even need to interact with one another. Sure, we’re sharing a campsite, but I’ll pitch my tent as far away from them as possible. We’ll trade polite smiles, make bland small talk, and sign off on Monday morning with a hearty See you in another seven years. Or better yet, make it an even ten!
With a sigh, I march across the dusty campsites toward the parked minivan, Buffy trotting beside me. Mom squeals as Eliana steps out into the bright sun and tosses her arms around my oldest sister. Eliana’s tall with toned calf muscles peeking out of her cropped leggings, an oversize T-shirt knotted at her waist. Her long wavy golden hair is soft and fluffy, reaching the middle of her back, a braided headband holding her bangs from her blue eyes. The smile on her face freezes as she spots me over Mom’s shoulder.
“Hi,” I call out and awkwardly wave before shoving my hands into the back pockets of my jean shorts. My shoulders creep up to my ears, and I can practically hear my therapist gently reminding me not to wear them as earrings.
The last time I saw Eliana was two years ago, when our mom had shoulder surgery. That particular visit began with Eliana’s judgmental comments over my hospital-gift-shop-sourced flowers and ended with her cornering me outside the bathroom and saying I was “stressing out” our convalescing mother because I complained about the hospital cafeteria food. I found a Band-Aid in my lasagna. There was no way I wasn’t going to talk about that.
Eliana steps around Mom—the smile still locked into place, but that’s probably due to the Botox, not affection—and walks over. “Hey,” she says and leans in to hug me. But it’s a ghost of a hug, her body barely touching mine.
“It’s nice—” I begin to say, but Eliana’s turning toward our mom, continuing their conversation as if I’m not standing three feet away. My cheeks burn with a mixture of annoyance and embarrassment, and I mutter “Guess I’ll go put up my tent, then” before walking to the trunk of my sedan and popping the lid.
