Ellie is a crabby old woman who cleans graffiti off local mailboxes. When she meets Sarah, a black-haired teenager in Goth garb and makeup, neither imagines that they will join forces to stop a psychopathic killer of homeless young people in the neighborhood park and forest. From the moment Sarah sees her dead friend Peter's athletic shoe poking out from a pile of curbside leaves as she helps Ellie wipe off mailbox graffiti, she knows an insane man disguised as a pirate is looking for her. Ellie receives a threatening phone call and understands someone's out to get her too, probably the same...

UPRUSH is a story, four stories actually, of four women who come together at a beach house to gossip, laugh and drink wine, only to discover that one of them is determined to kill herself. Madge, a writer, has reasons to do so and to ask for their help, and her friends, of course, have reasons to agree - or not. Madge's gift to them is four fictionalized stories of their lives, lives she has followed since they all graduated forty-some years before from a small college on the west coast. Her stories are not finished yet, just as the women are not yet finished. Their stories will not end, but...

SYNOPSIS: EDITH by Jo Barney Edith, sixty-seven, wakes on Christmas morning to find her husband Art lying next to her, dead. Their shotgun wedding, forty-some years before, has not led to a happy-ever-after scenario. Edith is pretty sure she doesn't like Art, perhaps never has, and she is sure he has felt the same way, but their senses of responsibility have kept them together. Edith has focused on raising her son Brian, who has become successful in all parts of his life: job, marriage, fatherhood, and he is the joy of her life, just about the only one. Art is cremated and buried, but a...