Skinny

She's a mail-order bride hunting for a lost treasure . . . one that her new groom was the last person to see. Lina Groves' outlaw father died in a shootout, leaving her with a brother in desperate need of medical treatment and no clue to the location of the treasure he'd claimed to have for his children. With her brother growing worse by the day, Lina needs a miracle. As if in answer to her prayers, she spots an advertisement for a mail-order bride--from none other than the sheriff who was the last person to see her father alive and the only one who might know where his treasure was hidden....

Fresh from finishing school, Violet receives a double shock. Her dad announces his upcoming wedding and then confesses an old lie - her mom didn't really leave for a sanitarium 11 years ago. But why then did she leave? Under cover of visiting the World's Fair, Violet travels to the stately Chicago home of her saintly grandmother and three eccentric great aunts.

Every object has a ghost. There is a small yellow backpack - half unzipped, mouth yawning to the pavement, contents strewn around it (a banana, an exercise book, a pair of scissors) - abandoned on a suburban footpath. Ten feet away, the rubber stamp of tyres, resisting clamped brakes, mount the curb and cut across the path. The tracks come to an end at a crippled stop sign. The street, a tree-lined suburban road dappled in late-afternoon sunlight, is calm. But anyone walking past can feel the ghosts: the prickle on the back of their necks that tells them something happened here.