Slate, a recovering lawyer who lost his family to an accident, lives on a sailboat, owns a beach bar, and occasionally helps clients recover things they have lost. Children, for example. Kris Kramer, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a Birmingham lawyer, Don Kramer, has been missing for two days when her father visits Slate in his beach bar, which isn't very busy on a raw day in January. Kramer engages Slate to try to find Kris. But two days after Slate arrives in Birmingham, Leon Grubbs, captain of the Homicide Division of the Birmingham Police Department, calls Slate just after midnight. A...

A surgeon studies for boards while coping with his wife's mental illness and treating a mysterious patient; a couple convince themselves that a stranger will make an offer on their house; a woman's new husband murders a lawyer in their living room; a businessman out of work learns uncomfortable truths about himself and his marriage. The stories in A Summer Dream occur at the intersection of the imaginations of their characters and their readers.