Five years after the end of World War II, Amie Stilwell returns to her hometown in Maine. There she connects with Shibby Travis, her surrogate mother, and tries to restart her life. But strange events seem to haunt the town--a silent boy is abandoned, a Boston socialite is found dead in a nearby barn, and an old friend believed to be a casualty of the war suddenly reappears. Amie must use all of her skills to discover the truths hiding in Pelican...

"When Judith Freeman was 22, she was working in the cookware department of the Mormon church-owned department store in the town in Utah where she grew up. She was living in her parents' house with her four year old son, who had already endured two heart surgeries, and she was in the process of divorcing her husband, whom she married at the age of 17. She had abandoned Mormonism, the faith into which she was born, and she was having an affair with...

"Born into a posh family, ten-year old Lizzie Vogel has lived a charmed life thus far, with a big sister who knows everything, a cute baby brother, and a full-time housekeeper who bakes jam tarts. But when, in 1970, Lizzie's father abandons her mother and packs his ex-family off to the tiny village of Flatstone, life for the Vogels veers catastrophically off-course. The new neighbors disapprove of divorcees and fatherless children, and Lizzie's theatrical...