Adult

Everyone thinks Emmy Dockery is crazy. Obsessed with finding the link between hundreds of unsolved cases, Emmy has taken leave from her job as an FBI researcher. Now all she has are the newspaper clippings that wallpaper her bedroom, and her recurring nightmares of an all-consuming fire.

When her father, a Thomas Hardy scholar and former college president, dies suddenly, Flora Dempsey leaves her job as editor of a magazine for the “domestically obsessive and organically minded” to return to the small New England town of Darwin (“three hours from everywhere”) to act as his literary executor, or “High Literary Executioner,” as she grimly recasts it.