steffani

Hollows Bend, New Hampshire, is a picture-perfect New England town where weekend tourists flock to see fall leaves and eat breakfast at the Stairway Diner. The crime rate—zero—is a point of pride for Sheriff Ellie Pritchett. The day the stranger shows up is when the trouble starts. The sheriff and her deputy investigate the mysterious teenage girl. None of the locals can place her. She can’t—or won’t—answer any questions. She won’t even tell them her name.

Returning to rural Vermont for her senior year after time abroad, New Yorker Daphne Howard just wants to make it to graduation. She’s still processing the sting of her social circle moving off-campus under the thrall of Serena Vigil, a talented poet from Texas who happens to be Daphne’s nemesis. But when a gruesome story overheard at a local bar leads Daphne to consider an unusual artifact discovered on campus in a new light, friends, lovers, and others unite to confront the collision of present and past, political, and personal.