Julian Ladd and Rye Adler cross paths as photography students in the exclusive Brodsky Workshop. Both men are fascinated with their beautiful and talented classmate, Magda, whose captivating images of her Polish neighborhood set her apart. Twenty years later, Rye is at the top of his field. When Magda reenters his life, asking for help only he can give, Rye finds himself in a broken landscape of street people and addicts, and his search for a missing boy becomes his own desperate fight to survive. Months later, when Julian discovers Rye’s obituary, the paper makes it sound like a suicide. Julian attends the funeral, where there is no casket and no body. This sudden reentry into a world he thought he left behind forces Julian to question not only Rye’s death, but the very foundations of his life.

Late one winter afternoon in the small town of Chosen, New York, professor George Clare knocks on his neighbor’s door with terrible news: he returned from work to find his wife, Catherine, murdered in their bed. Once a thriving dairy farm, their home is haunted by the tragedy that left the former owner’s three sons orphaned and adrift. As one dark secret peels away to reveal others --- and as the Clare marriage reveals itself to have a sinister darkness that rivals the farm’s history --- Elizabeth Brundage offers a rich and complex portrait of the scars that can haunt a community for generations and the dark longings inside each and every one of us that drive us to do inexplicable things.