Nancy Pickard's I.O.U.

This was a great improvement over the last mystery I read. Parts of it were hard to read because of some of the issues the main character was dealing with, but (that considered) I found I.O.U., by Nancy Pickard, to be a quick enjoyable read.

From the dust jacket:

It was foggy the day of the funeral...white swirling mists that obscured the mourners' features...that matched the thick fog of pain and confusion in Jenny's brain. Jenny's mother was dead, carried away by pneumonia after lying for years in a virtual coma in the Hampshire Psychiatric Hospital.

As friends and family pressed around to offer condolences, a hand clutched Jenny's arm, and an anonymous voice whispered, "Forgive me. It was an accident." Before Jenny could see a face, the person was gone....

Jenny had no idea what it meant. And it didn't seem to matter. Nothing seemed to matter except her grief and her guilt, and the questions that haunted her every waking moment, and made her fear her own sanity: What had really been wrong with her mother? How did it happen? And how was it all connected with the bankruptcy of the family business, Cain Clams, a disaster her father had never really been able to explain?

Jenny decided to find the answers...yet it wasn't so easy. No one seemed willing to talk about her mother, and when she asked about her father's business, she was stonewalled by an old boy network that ran far deeper than she'd ever imagined.

Jenny was discouraged, exhausted, emotionally raw. It was no wonder she drove into the garage and went to sleep with her head on the steering wheel and the motor still running. No wonder she wound up in the hospital, nearly dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. No one would be surprised if Jenny had gone mad, like her poor, sweet mother, and tried to end it all...least of all Jenny.

Except that Jenny hadn't tried to commit suicide....