Ellie Stone, a young newspaper reporter in 1960s' upstate New York, investigates a double murder at an abandoned stud farm near glamorous Saratoga Springs, NY. August 1962. A suspicious fire claims a tumbledown foaling barn on the grounds of the once-proud Tempesta Stud Farm, halfway between New Holland and Saratoga Springs. The blaze, one of several in recent years at the abandoned farm, barely prompts a shrug from the local sheriff. That is until...

"December 21, 1960, the shortest day of the year: Fifteen-year-old Darleen Hicks slips away from her school bus as it idles in the junior-high parking lot, waiting to depart. Moments later the bus rumbles away without her, and she is never seen again. New Year's Eve 1960: The small upstate town of New Holland, New York, is in the grips of a severe cold snap, when Ellie Stone receives a late-night caller--Irene Metzger, the grieving mother of Darleen...

"In the waning days of a lazy August holiday, Ellie Stone is enjoying a bright Adirondack-lake morning. Nearby, two men plummet to their deaths on the rocks below, just a few feet short of the water of a dangerous diving pool. A tragic accident, it seems. But the state police quickly establish that the two victims--one, a stranger to the lake and, the other, a teenaged boy from a nearby band camp--surely didn't know each other. That anomaly is strange...