Showing results by author "Lara Cleveland Torgesen" in All Categories

Chrissy Rollings has a mountain of troubles to overcome, one that would crush most other girls her age. She was born in a small North Carolina town in 1952, into a poor but happy and loving family that always managed to scrape by each month... until the night her father died in a car crash, plunging the family into poverty. Chrissy’s mother is forced to take low-paying jobs to supplement her meager welfare checks, leaving Chrissy to raise her five siblings. But even these sacrifices are not enough.

Thirty-nine-year-old social recluse Clara O'Connell has been caught in a comfortable rut with her daily routines - cleaning, TV watching, recipe searching, and keeping tabs on the neighbors from behind her binoculars - since she first moved to her neighborhood 14 years ago. But her world abruptly topples when a giant oak tree at her property line crashes into the next-door home, killing a neighbor she has monitored for years and spawning an unsettling obsessive thought: Clara might be responsible for the tragedy.