When Arden Arrowood was four years old, her two-year-old twin sisters were stolen from the front yard of their hometown of Keokuk, Iowa, on the Mississippi River while Arden watched. Twenty years later, she returns home to confront the darkest part of her past. As the mystery unravels, the novel explores the reliability of memory, the stories we tell ourselves, and the power of love.

"Everyone has a secret they'll do anything to hide... Twenty-five years ago, the body of sixteen-year-old Eve Knox was found in the caves near her home in small-town Grotto, Iowa -- discovered by her best friend, Maggie, and her sister, Nola. There were a handful of suspects, including her boyfriend, Nick, but without sufficient evidence the case ultimately went cold. For decades Maggie was haunted by Eve's death and that horrible night. Now a detective...

Marshal Sweeney Delaney was just a rookie in his small Iowa town when Congress ratified the 18th Amendment. Prohibition threw the whole nation into a tailspin. Even teetotaling Christians jumped on the bandwagon and began making panther piss in a still behind the barn. Then—a Chicago gangster came to town. His name: Louie La Cava. Sweeney followed the adage: Keep your friends close; your enemies closer. Two old friends are part of his inner circle:...

"Ashley Morgan, thirty-eight, married and mother of three, is in Cedar Rapids for an educational conference. But a chance encounter with Jaymes Fitzgerald, a free spirited, twenty-four-year-old graduate student and consummate blues player quickly turns into a dinner invitation and an evening of "dancing on water". The ease of their togetherness leads to an offer to ditch the conferrence to enjoy a day of exploration and untethered freedom. They visit...

It is the beginning of a new century at Lake Manawa Resort in Iowa, but some things never change. When 22-year-old Emily Graham's meddlesome aunts and grandmother take it upon themselves to find her a husband among the resort guests, the spunky suffragist is determined to politely decline each and every suitor. She has neither the time nor the need for a man in her busy life. Carter Stockton, a recent college graduate and pitcher for the Manawa Owls...

"Dr. Wiltse leaves behind his beloved Canada in the mid-1850s with wife Phebe and three young children to establish new roots in America. Only Phebe knows of his attraction to murder... His well-oiled black canvas bag simply allows him into emplacements where others may not go. Still, his fellow French Canadians called him 'Guerisseur,' (Healer). Perhaps, the pioneer physician is also running from entanglements of the past."--

Family patriarch Walter Langdon has died, and his children have fanned out across the country. The narrative moves year by year from 1953 to 1986, encompassing Cold War blinkeredness, Sixties rebellion, and escalating wealth into the Eighties.

"A sharp and bitingly funny novel about a professor whose calm-ish midwestern life gives way to a vortex of crises--and her attempts to salvage the pieces without going to pieces herself...In the space of a few torrid months on the Iowa prairie, Phillipa Maakestad--long-married theater professor and mother of an unstable daughter--grapples with a life turned upside down. After falling headlong into a passionate affair during a semester spent teaching...

A charming roller coaster designer takes no-nonsense young widow Lilly Hart on the ride of her life when Lilly steps out of the shadows of her intrusive in-laws and takes a summer job as a cook at Lake Manawa.

"When her husband's car is found abandoned and on fire-in the middle of a rainstorm-police suspect that Eve Roth had something to do with it. After all, her husband was suspended from the University of Iowa for inappropriate conduct with a student, and who else but an atmospheric physicist could incinerate a car in a downpour? But Eve has no idea why her husband disappeared. She's desperate to find him, both for herself and her beloved, disabled father-in-law....