In 1869, Gloriana Womack's family is much smaller since smallpox killed her mother and two of her siblings. She lives in a modest cottage in Duluth, Minnesota, with her father and young brother, and she has dedicated her life to holding her tiny, fractured family together--especially as her father is frequently gone on long fishing trips. Their livelihood may come from the waters of Lake Superior, but storms on the lake can be dangerous, even to those...

Detective Jonathan Stride's first wife, Cindy, died of cancer eight years ago, but her ghost hangs over Stride's relationship with current lover, and fellow detective, Serena Dial

"Jonathan Stride's best friend, Steve Garske, makes a shocking deathbed confession: he protected Stride by covering up a murder. Hours later, the police dig up Steve's yard and find a body with a bullet hole in its skull. Stride is pretty sure he knows who it is. Seven years ago, an out-of-town reporter disappeared while investigating anonymous allegations of rape against a prominent politician. Back then, the police believed that the reporter drowned...

"After nearly dying of a gunshot wound, Jonathan Stride has been on leave from the Duluth Police for more than a year. When his partner, Maggie Bei, gets called about a suspicious abduction involving a local lawyer, she tells Stride it's time for him to come back. Attorney Gavin Webster says he paid $100,000 in ransom money to the men who kidnapped his wife. Now they've disappeared with the cash, and she's still missing. Gavin claims to be desperate...

When a freak auto accident kills a driver on the remote roads outside Duluth, Jonathan Stride is disturbed to discover that the victim appears to be a "ghost," with a false identity and no evidence to suggest who he really was. What's worse, the man has a gun locked in the trunk- and the gun has recently been fired. The next day, Stride learns that a Duluth college student has vanished, and he worries that the two incidents are related. But what would...

Hilary and Mark Bradley are trapped in a web of suspicion. Last year, accusations of a torrid affair with a student cost Mark his teaching job and made the young couple into outcasts in their remote island town off the Lake Michigan coast. Hilary Bradley is determined to prove that Mark is innocent, but sheś on a lonely, dangerous quest.

Thirty years ago, in the summer after his junior year of high school, Jonathan Stride fell in love with Cindy Starr, the girl who would become his wife. But that same summer, Cindy's sister Laura was brutally murdered. The police suspected a drifter of committing the crime, but Stride and Cindy were convinced the killer was someone close to Laura. Someone who got away with murder. Now, as Laura's best friend returns to town, old emotions are unearthed...