About the featured author:
From the author’s website:
In her first career, Zelly was a social worker in the adoption and foster care field. From there, she owned an online retail store specializing in hand-painted children’s gifts and party favors. Along the way, Zelly volunteered and raised funds for several non-profit organizations. In an alternate universe, she is probably an event planner. But once she moved to New York City, Zelly gave in to the compulsion to write women’s fiction spiced with suspense about motherhood, relationships, loss and love. Her debut novel, Not Yours to Keep, came out October 2024 with She Writes Press.
When she’s not devising twisty plots, Zelly loves traveling, hiking, and is passionate about and volunteers for Brain Aneurysm Awareness. Her involvement in the cause is driven by personal experiences, including surviving an unruptured brain aneurysm, the tragic loss of a family member to a rupture, and supporting a friend in their recovery. Read more about why she’s a dedicated advocate for brain aneurysm awareness and research in her Brain Aneurysm Essay.
About Zelly’s book Not Yours To Keep:
Billie Campbell, a Massachusetts adoption specialist grappling with fertility issues, dreams of adopting a baby, but not just any baby—her pregnant client’s baby. While her longing threatens to send her down a dark path, her husband, Tyler, is keeping secrets: he’s full of doubts about becoming a father, and he’s also trying to figure out who is sending him upsetting anonymous texts and photos. On the other side of town, Anne, a woman scarred by childhood abuse, obsesses with a second chance at becoming a family with the two people she regrets ever having let go of: the baby she gave up for adoption twenty years ago, and the man of her dreams.
Their lives get tangled when the client’s newborn is abducted, and Billie becomes a prime suspect.
Amid the chaos unleashed by the abduction, Tyler uncovers a link between the person tormenting him and the abduction—but now Billie has disappeared too. The race to find both her and the baby is on; but will they find them before it’s too late?
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“Two women are pulled together by their complicated relationships to motherhood in the tense but humane thriller Not Yours to Keep…whose suspense is directed by the intense emotions brought forth by the loss—or unrealized gain—of a child.”—Foreword Clarion Review
“An often intriguing narrative about loss and enduring hope.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Part emotional story of adoption and motherhood, and part heart-pounding suspense, Not Yours To Keep will have you racing to the end as you are swept into the lives of three people on a collision course.”
—Lyn Liao Butler, Amazon bestselling author of Someone Else’s Life
Author visits:
Author visits with Zelly are available via Adventures by the Book here.