Not Quite Dead Yet

**A Novel by Holly Jackson**

*Estimated Reading Time: 18 minutes*

**What This Story Explores**

A woman with one week left to live races to solve her own murder. It is a story about borrowed time, family secrets, and the difference between merely existing and actually living.

**Who This Book Is For**

Readers who love propulsive mysteries with emotional depth, anyone who has ever postponed their own life waiting for the right moment, and those who understand that sometimes the people closest to us hold the darkest truths.

Jet Mason is twenty-seven years old, living in Woodstock, Vermont, in a life that has never quite started. She dropped out of law school. She works for her father's construction company without conviction. She has a dog named Reggie, an ex-boyfriend she avoids at the town fair, and a habit of putting everything off until later. Later is her catchphrase, the joke her family makes at her expense, the comfortable excuse that has defined her entire adult existence. Then, on Halloween night, someone walks into her home through an unlocked side door and strikes her three times in the back of the head with a hammer. She never sees the face. She never turns around. She collapses onto her living room floor while her dog screams into the night. Jet survives the attack, but only barely. When she wakes in the ICU two days later, the doctors deliver a diagnosis more devastating than the assault itself. A bone fragment from her shattered skull has drifted against her basilar artery, one of the brain's major blood supplies. Normally, doctors would wait for it to migrate harmlessly. But Jet inherited polycystic kidney disease from her father, a condition that weakens her arterial walls beyond repair. An aneurysm will form at the pressure site. When it ruptures, the hemorrhage will be fatal. Surgery carries less than ten percent survival odds. Another surgeon refused to even consider it. The choice collapses to two options: near-certain death on the operating table right now, or certain death within roughly a week. Her mother commands her to choose surgery. Her brother Luke insists. The whole family gathers around the hospital bed, already mourning. But Jet has spent her entire life postponing everything with the promise of later. Now later is all she has left, and she claims it. She refuses the surgery, choosing a week of consciousness over near-certain death on the table. She swings her legs off the bed and announces what she plans to do with her borrowed time: solve her own murder. It is the first thing she has ever committed to finishing. What follows is a week-long investigation that peels back the surface of a small…