When Kiera McKenna’s best friend’s nephew disappears, the case shatters Kiera’s already fragile life. Trapped in a controlling marriage to a powerful newspaper publisher and struggling with a fractured relationship with her adult son, she begins investigating the missing boy on her own.
For Reggie Parks, the disappearance resurrects a nightmare. Decades earlier, his younger brother vanished, leaving Reggie under a cloud of suspicion that never lifted. Now, with another boy missing, old accusations resurface and he once again finds himself at the center of suspicion.
As Kiera digs deeper, she uncovers long-buried secrets that connect past and present in unexpected ways. The closer she gets to the truth, the more she realizes the greatest danger may be closer to home than she ever imagined. Because the secrets aren’t buried. They’re just waiting to be found.
When Kiera McKenna’s best friend’s nephew disappears, the case shatters Kiera’s already fragile life. Trapped in a controlling marriage to a powerful newspaper publisher and struggling with a fractured relationship with her adult son, she begins investigating the missing boy on her own.
For Reggie Parks, the disappearance resurrects a nightmare. Decades earlier, his younger brother vanished, leaving Reggie under a cloud of suspicion that never lifted. Now, with another boy missing, old accusations resurface and he once again finds himself at the center of suspicion.
As Kiera digs deeper, she uncovers long-buried secrets that connect past and present in unexpected ways. The closer she gets to the truth, the more she realizes the greatest danger may be closer to home than she ever imagined. Because the secrets aren’t buried. They’re just waiting to be found.
Friday, May 12, 1995
Him
My eyes are trained on the glass exit doors where he's just appeared, cock of the walk, gazing into the busy parking lot and contemplating his next move.
Come outside. Let me see you.
I've been crouching behind a fat oak tree, and my thighs are aching, but I grit my teeth and bear the necessary discomfort. At the bottom of the hill below me, he confidently strolls out of the ice cream shop. Immediately, beams of sunlight envelop him until his body seems to glow like an angel's. Even if I believed in angels, this kid sure as fuck isn't one. And that's the whole point, isn't it?
Without meaning to, I snort loud enough that I fear someone will look up here. I duck my head behind the tree.
As I'm hunched over in the tall weeds, my heart skitters and jumps inside my chest. A cardinal trills nearby, and I squeeze my eyes closed, willing the bird to shut the hell up or fly away. When I dare to peer around the tree again, a throng of lemmings has surrounded the object of my attention, feeding his undeserved ego. They are wannabe teenagers gathered on a Friday night, similarly dressed in ripped jeans and T-shirts with logos like MTV, Pearl Jam, and Nirvana.
He stands out—of course he does—with his good looks, long blond hair, oversized tee, and expensive jeans. I despise the so-called grunge look he favors.
Disrespectful, I think with a shake of my head.
The groupies eat their treats, laughing and elbowing each other in the ribs, seemingly pleased by their childish exchanges of witty banter. When their ice cream cones shrink to nothing, they wave at each other and follow adults to various cars. Engines turn over. The object of my attention sidles toward a beat-up Pontiac, a late-seventies or early-eighties model, opens the back door, and slides in. Within minutes, his car and a dozen others fall into a line, their blinkers flashing. The Pontiac crawls into the street like an ant following its brethren.
I sigh with a quiet breath because even now, I'm not sure.
When the coast is clear, I stand to stretch my legs and pull the collar of my windbreaker high and the bill of my black Nebraska ball cap far down. I slide my thumbs into my jeans pockets and make my way down the back slope of the hill, leaving any remaining ice cream junkies behind. There's a hint of manure in the air, thanks to the nearby farms, which blends nicely with the aroma of freshly mowed grass and hay. The combination isn't odd or unpleasant if you've grown up in a small rural town.
While I'm considering this, I stumble forward, a clown in humongous shoes. I'm all palms and elbows when I hit the soft ground, as grateful in that moment for the recent rain as the farmers who prayed for it. I roll like a log for a bit before digging in my heels, and my body stops. I lie flat on my back in the grass and blink at the blue sky, breathing in, out.
Yes, I say to the universe, you have my attention.
When I'm ready, I stand and brush bits of dirt and grass from my jeans and shirt. I know now that this is my last scouting trip—the universe has just slapped me, figuratively speaking, and given me direction, swiping away any lingering doubts.
He is definitely the right choice.
Pamela Ungashick’s All We Keep Buried protagonist, Kiera McKenna, is married to a powerful newspaper publisher. It’s not the marriage she had hoped for, but it’s tolerable. Pierce is domineering, but he provides for her well and she has her hobby, building birdhouses. Her major source of distress is her relationship with her adult son, Wyatt, but she conceives a plan to fix that. Only sometimes things just don’t go to plan. When Kiera’s best friend’s nephew suddenly goes missing, the disappearance spotlights the past disappearance of Reggie Parks’ brother, and leads Reggie to seek Keira’s help to solve a decades-old mystery. When Keira and Reggie start digging, though, they discover far more than they could have guessed Keira’s loved ones were trying to hide.
Pamela Ungashick is an award-winning author of suspenseful, dark fiction, and the awards are well-deserved. She has a talent for devising suspenseful page-turning plots and for shaping characters who come to life. Her prose is rich and filled with subtle wit. All We Keep Buried is Pamela’s second novel. Her first, Somebody Knows was a Reader’s Favorite International Contest Gold Medal Winner in the Fiction-Thriller-Psychological genre and also winner of a 2026 BestThrillers.com Book Award. Both novels paint heart-breaking portraits of her protagonists in stories that are simply unputdownable.
In All We Keep Buried, Ungashick teases readers to think they have the answers, then throws curved balls that show that they, like the sleuths in the story, were heading up entirely the wrong path. The twists and turns keep readers guessing right to the stunningly heartbreaking conclusion. Narrators alternate between chapters, with some told by Keira, some by Reggie, and some by the mysterious ‘Him', who remains unidentified until near the end.
Ungashick didn’t just bury bodies in this story. There’s buried guilt, shame, betrayal, suspicion, abuse and shocking buried secrets, and when they come to light, you will likely cry a river, along with the characters the truth devastates. Readers should be warned. All We Keep Buried is a thrilling read, and a brilliant psychological study of a mother’s love and pain, but it might leave you weeping, and it might haunt you for weeks after your turn the last page. It’s just a fantastic read; a brilliant display of outstanding writing talent.