"Beware the blackbirds... It's Halloween in Vermont, winter is coming, and five humans, two dogs, and a cat are a crowd in Mercy Carr's small cabin. She needs more room--and she knows just the place: Grackle Tree Farm, with thirty acres of woods and wetlands and a Victorian manor to die for. They say it's haunted by the ghosts of missing children and lost poets and a murderer or two, but Mercy loves it anyway. Even when Elvis finds a dead body in...

"National Book Award Finalist Howard Norman delivers another "provocative ... haunting"* novel, this time set in a Vermont village and featuring a missing child, a newly married private detective, and a highly relatable ghost (*Janet Maslin, New York Times)"-- It's been several months since Simon Inescort had a heart attack and keeled over the rail of a Nova Scotia-bound ferry. His widow, Lorca Pell, sold their farmhouse to newlyweds Zachary and...

"A forty-year-old skeleton is found encased in a concrete slab at a recently decommissioned nuclear energy site. It becomes a case for the Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI) and its leader, Joe Gunther, since they have the resources and the ability to investigate an old, very cold, missing persons case that has now been reclassified as murder. The victim was Hank Mitchell, and Gunther must chase down old rumors and speculations who benefited from...

The Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI) has been pulled onto three cases at the same time; meanwhile, VBI head Joe Gunther has to take time off to care for his ailing mother.

Those cases are now in the hands of the individual investigators. Sammie Martens is assigned a murder case. The victim is a young woman, the roommate of the daughter of medical examiner Beverly Hillstrom. A recent transplant from Albany, New York, Sammie must find

...

On the edge of town Joe Gunther encounters the lifeless body of Michelle Fisher. Her corpse offers him no clues about who she was or how she died. Snapshots and postcards show a woman who laughed hard and lived harder, while diaries reveal a rootless life marred by depression and drink. Suicide seems a reasonable conclusion, but Gunther suspects foul play.

For ten summers, the extended Seton family met at their country home in New Hampshire, but during the eleventh summer everything changed.