Erin May

Women can be heroes. When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances “Frankie” McGrath hears these words, it is a revelation. Raised in the sun-drenched, idyllic world of Southern California and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing. But in 1965, the world is changing, and she suddenly dares to imagine a different future for herself. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path.

My name is Norah Canivan, and for 50 years I’ve kept a secret. It is a secret about the girl I discovered hiding on our sorry patch of land - the girl in the tattered green dress who was running from something - and someone. The Girl in Green brought something different into my young life. And something darker. And when she died, nothing was ever the same after. For 50 years, only I’ve known what really happened to The Girl in Green. And now, these many years later, my secret may kill me.

It's August 1984, and paperboy Christopher Stewart has gone missing. Hours later, 12-year-old Sammy Cox hurries home from his own paper route, red-faced and out of breath, hiding a terrible secret. Crystal, Sammy's 17-year-old sister, is worried by the disappearance but she also sees an opportunity: the Stewart case has echoes of an earlier unsolved disappearance of another boy, one town over. Crystal senses the makings of an award-winning essay, one that could win her a scholarship - and a ticket out of their small Iowa town.

Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a horrific accident when he was seven, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself—and his dad. When Charlie is seventeen, he meets a dog named Radar and her aging master, Howard Bowditch, a recluse in a big house at the top of a big hill, with a locked shed in the backyard. Sometimes strange sounds emerge from that shed.

Gerald Holstrom is serving his life sentence trying not to think of the crime that led him to 47 years inside. His hands hurt, his back aches, he waits to die. Death comes swiftly at the end of a sharp piece of metal. Gerald fades, his regrets flood him. He wishes only to see the sky without barbed wire blocking his vision.