Oren, a young cellist is in love with enchanting Anna Rosen, and with the enchanting cello "Francesca." He was present at the birth of the cello, created her varnish, and was her first player. He knows her, and wants to know more. Anna, on the other hand, bears scars and secrets that she is reluctant to reveal, even as she and Oren commence a dazzling and passionate affair. When a time comes to choose, both Anna and Francesca disappear from Oren's life, leaving wreckage and heartbreak. In a frozen and melancholy middle age, Oren begins to hope that he can salvage himself by recovering the...

In this fourth book of the Hap Maryland saga, Hap and his little family, joined by tough-as-nails glamor girl Suellen Ransom, take a break from a hard year in steaming hot Gabbro, NC by going for a gentle hike in the Smokies. Cool breezes, mountain views, silence, camaraderie, virgin forests. There, they encounter eco-poet and wilderness saint Derwood Barnes Cather and his slightly off-kilter son DB. Is DB just an idiosyncratic guy, certainly shy, and maybe an egg shy of a dozen, or is he something a good deal more sinister? Why is there a human bone on the trail that leads to their...

A delayed message from her mother pricks the conscience of Hap Maryland's pal Suellen Ransom. Trudi Ransom was a grifter and a cheat who put the young Suellen, thirteen and pregnant, on a bus to be raised catch-as-catch-can by off-duty cop Wetmore Parsonage. Now Suellen must track down Trudi's killer in the country-music hotbed of Branson, Missouri. When Suellen disappears, Hap gets on her trail, helped and distracted by sex researcher Paula Vanek. Nothing, including Trudi's death, is what it appears to be. The chase brings to light a tangle of secrets that others are desperate to keep...