Three women go hiking. One of them already knows the way.It was supposed to be girls day. Mara, a waitress living on tips and bad decisions. Ari, her oldest friend, fresh off a divorce that took everything. Anna, the roommate who reads the lease and keeps the receipts. The loop road is flooded, so they take a gravel cutoff that isn't on the park map. Somebody in the car knew it was there. Nobody says who.Under the roots of a fallen cottonwood, a quarter mile off the trail, they find a yellow waterproof case. Inside: ten thousand dollars in hundreds, a tablet, three black phones, a blank check drawn on a bank that doesn't seem to exist, and a green notepad full of codes. The first phone opens to Mara's thumb. The second opens to Ari's face. The third won't open for anyone.The first code takes ten minutes to crack. It spells their names, the word TODAY, and the hour they found the box.The phones are full of them. Two years of photos taken through windshields and half-open bedroom doors. Bank balances. Signed papers. A motel video nobody remembers making. Every secret these women have kept from each other, laid out like evidence and handed to the one person it would hurt most.The codes lead to a motel and a night none of them can account for. Then they lead somewhere worse: to the flooded road at the bottom of the same park, where, the night after graduation, a skinny boy walked into the dark in his underwear and never came out.Mara has spent her adult life waking up in yesterday's clothes and reading her own sent messages like they belong to a stranger. She has holes in her nights that she has never looked into. Somebody else has.The men in their lives are no help. Dez works on the fourth floor, in an office with no name on the door. Curtis runs a desk at the bank branch on the ground floor of the same building and keeps his socks on. They play cards at the same table every Thursday, and they know more about that yellow box than they are saying.Then there is Gordy, the card player they finally stopped inviting, who looks people up for a hobby and has a very long memory. Somewhere in town, a mother named Lorraine is still waiting for anybody who can tell her where her son is. And down at the sheriff's office, a patient investigator named Strand can only work with what people hand him.Now the county is about to dig up that road. Somebody is paying close attention to all of it, and every piece of that yellow box was chosen by someone who knows exactly how these friends will turn on each other.By Friday, one of the three has set a deadline: nine o'clock Saturday morning, the sheriff's office, all of it said out loud. Not everyone at the table intends to keep that appointment.Four codes. Three will fall to anyone with a phone and a little patience. The fourth can only be solved with the paperback.Wake Up Clean is a dark, funny, twisted psychological thriller about friendship, betrayal, and the nights we would rather not remember, and about what happens when somebody else remembers them for us. Blackouts, bad men, good liars, a yellow box, and a real puzzle hidden in the pages.Bonus afterword: A Final Mystery. The true story of Kryptos, the sculpture at CIA headquarters whose last ninety-seven letters beat the best codebreakers alive for thirty-five years, and the box of papers where the answer turned up.Contains strong language, sexual situations, drug use, and violence. Read more
